Calligraphy Lesson

by Mikhail Shishkin

  It turned out that all these archives were transferred to Russia after the war and are held to this day in Podolsk, near Moscow. My grandmother and my father lived so many years in ignorance of their Boris’s fate, and it was their own country, for whose sake Boris had died, that held the truth back from them. Only after Perestroika were the archives opened temporarily, and Western historians made copies of them. I received Uncle Borya’s card from the Norwegian archives within a single week, yet Grandma and Dad received no news of him from their own state in a whole lifetime.

  Information concerning POWs was kept secret because in reality the state was waging war against its own people. My relatives, my loved ones lived out their entire lives in a prison nation which used them for its wars and despised them.

  When Perestroika began, my father made an enquiry to the KGB about the fate of his father. All the victims of Stalin’s repressions were being rehabilitated. He showed me an official letter confirming the rehabilitation of his father, my grandfather. Charges were being dismissed for lack of corpus delicti. Dad had been tanking up since morning and would only bellow, “Bastards! Bastards!”

  After the war he drank his whole life through. And all his submariner friends, too. They probably couldn’t do otherwise. It was the disease of their generation. Aged eighteen, he spent months on end immured in a submarine, haunted by the constant fear of drowning in an iron coffin. An experience like that can shackle you for the rest of your life.

  Under Gorbachev, when the really hungry years began, my veteran father received food parcels containing produce from Germany. In his eyes this represented a personal humiliation. He and his friends had seen themselves as victors their whole lives, and now he was forced to feed from the hand of the vanquished foe. He regarded the collapse of the USSR as defeat in a war he had waged together with the rest of the country. My father hated Gorbachev.

  I didn’t like Gorbachev either, but precisely for the reason that he did everything in his power to prevent the collapse of the USSR and the entire Soviet system. My father and I viewed the history being made around us from opposite vantage points. There was an unbridgeable gulf between us. We had long since ceased to be close to one another. And this, of course, had little to do with politics.

  The final straw leading to our estrangement came at my wedding. Inviting him, I remember, was a conciliatory gesture on my part. Dad got drunk, started a punch-up, and I had to restrain him with the help of a friend and pack him off home in a taxi. It was hard for me to forgive him such things.

  It’s so important to be proud of one’s father. But I was ashamed of mine.

  I started communicating with him again only shortly before his death. He spent his last years simply destroying himself with vodka. Denied his drink, he’d start smashing up everything in the house. Zinaida Vasilievna stopped fighting for him—she herself would buy him his bottles so he’d get sozzled and quickly pass out. He drank so much it seemed strange his body was still holding up. All his submariner friends had long since drunk themselves into the grave. My father must’ve been in a hurry to rejoin his war buddies. Out of their whole boat he was the last man standing.

  At the funeral feast Zinaida Vasilievna told of how my father died:

  “He’s fallen off the bed and he yells, ‘Zina! Zina, I can’t see anything! Turn the light on! The light! I need more light!’ It is light, Pasha, I say, it’s sunny outside!”

  It was odd that my bibulous veteran-submariner father should have uttered the same dying cry as Goethe.

  For as long as I can remember, my father always said that, upon his death, he must be laid in the coffin wearing his sailor’s uniform. And at the morgue a grey-haired swabby was wheeled out to us in an open coffin. Lately his whole body had been quaking and shaking, but now, arms folded on his chest, he had an air of serenity, as if mollified by the thought that he wasn’t being cremated just any-old-how, but in his striped sailor’s jersey.

  The coffin turned out to be too short. His head wouldn’t fit—it was wedged up against the coffin wall, his chin pressing into his chest—and his face wore a strange, lively expression which betrayed mild annoyance. Can’t even put me into the coffin properly, it seemed to be saying.

  Zinaida Vasilievna went off to remonstrate with the morgue authorities, but they just jabbed a finger at the receipt: You ordered 180 cm, we put him in 180 cm. A woman in a grubby white coat and rubber gloves came out and started explaining that coffins must be ordered with room to spare because dead bodies tend to stretch:

  “Were you unaware of that or what?”

  Zinaida Vasilievna waved a hand, loath to get involved:

  “Do whatever you want! I’ve no strength left to deal with this.”

  We had to go to the crematorium at Mitino. A bus was laid on, caked with dirt to the very windows. I made to close the coffin. Nails had already been hammered into the lid, but I only noticed this when it wouldn’t shut properly. I took a look: a nail had lodged itself right into the top of my father’s head. Something reddish-blue had oozed out of the ripped skin and into his grey hair. The coffin was left open.

  As I sat in that screechy, clapped-out bus—clutching the seat for fear of being sent flying by a pothole, my leg keeping the coffin from sliding away—I remembered the bike rides to Ilyinsky Forest Dad and I went on every August before school started. Time and again he’d shoot off ahead on his heavy trophy cycle. “Dad, wait!” I’d yell, and I’d try and catch him up on my Orlyonok, hop-skipping over tree-roots: there were pines all around, and weaving along the paths would’ve been better. At times you’d come across sandy areas, and your tires would sink.

  In the crematorium, when the time had come to close the coffin, I bent the nail to the side as best as I could so Dad would be spared more pain.

  Shortly before he died, my father resolved to have us photographed together.

  “What for?” I said.

  He tried to convince me:

  “I’ll pop my clogs, Mishka, and you’ll look at the photo and maybe you’ll think back to your old man the sailor!”

  “All right, old-man-the-sailor, let’s go!” I said, just to get him off my back.

  We went to a photo-studio near their house just outside Strogino. We sat down in front of a Lumière-brothers-era camera. The photographer, a young girl with a boyish hairdo, said, pulling a strand of gum from between her teeth, “You could do with a smile!”

  Our attempt to produce one couldn’t have been too convincing: “Say cheese, now!” laughed the girl.

  Just recently I was looking for something or other, going through old papers, and suddenly there it was—that very photo. Dad and I, earlobes touching, both with cheese in our mouths.

  My son phoned in the evening, when he was changing trains in Brig, and I drove down in my old Golf to pick him up at the station in Leuk.

  He came out of the train with a massive backpack—that’s how he travels the world. We hugged. Every time I see him these days, I marvel at how grown-up he’s become—a whole head taller than me now.

  On the way back I pestered him with silly pointless questions about his studies, about university, about his flatmates. He studies in Vienna. Historisch-Kulturwissenschaftliche Europaforschung. He told me about his amusing professors, whom he loves for their love of history, and I listened enviously. I studied foreign languages at the Lenin Pedagogical Institute, but the principal subjects there were history of the Communist Party and scientific communism. And I hated the professors. How strange that slavery should be known as a science.

  While he took a shower and unpacked, I got supper ready: fried potatoes with onion and sausages.

  “Mmm, smells good!” he shouted from his room.

  We ate at the table by the window, looking on as the Weisshorn glowed pinker and pinker in the sunset. Alpenglühen. I told him about my encounter with my father on the mountain path.

  “I barely remember Granddad. Tell me something about him! What can you remember from your childho
od?”

  And I started telling him about what I could still recall. About how, when he was drunk, my father would always start belting out the 60s hit “Mishka, Mishka, Where’s Your Smile?” and, wrapping his great big arms around me, a preschooler, he’d make me sing along, but I tried to struggle free—his drunken stench was horrible. And about how we’d go cycling in Ilyinsky Forest. And about other odds and ends. Suddenly it transpired that the long years of my childhood had been distilled into a mere handful of recollections.

  One involved a trick my ex-submariner had once shown me. I see it clearly: we’re going for a haircut on a Sunday, and I’m whingeing—I’m scared of the hair-clipper and I hate the barber’s. He’s pulling me by the arm, and look, he says, look at this trick! And, miraculously, Dad’s become a giant, and he’s holding out on his palm a tram that’s pulled in to a stop.

  My son laughed and said that I’d shown him that same trick when he was a kid. Only it wasn’t a tram I had on my palm, but the high-riser on Vosstaniya Square.

  We started reminiscing about his own childhood. About how we went off to meet his mum at the station one day, and it was so heaving with people we were scared we’d lose her, and then I sat him on my shoulders, and he saw her and yelled at the top of his lungs, “Mummy, mummy! We’re here!”—and was dead proud later on because he thought that, had he not spied his mum out in the crowd from the height of my shoulders, she’d never have found us.

  “Tell me,” he asked, “what’s the happiest childhood memory you have of your father?”

  I remembered the haymow. Born in the countryside and into a peasant family, my father lived his whole life the wrong way—as a city-dweller, spending years in some office—but he yearned to be a peasant, to work the land that had been taken away from them. And so, come summertime in the dacha, he loved working with the soil, planting apple trees, crafting, digging, building. He always dreamt of sleeping outside, on a haymow, rather than in the house. Once he brought a whole haycock over from somewhere and fixed himself a bed right under the open sky. I was about seven or eight, and I cajoled him into letting me sleep with him. It was such a delight to lie on that prickly bed, nuzzling into my father’s shoulder and breathing in the overwhelming fragrance of the hay! It being August, stars were falling. We lay there, the universe looming above us, and looked on as meteors streaked across the sky.

  We sat and talked, my son and I, until it was completely dark and the stars had risen over the Valais. And suddenly he said, “Let’s go!”

  It was cool outside now. We wrapped ourselves in blankets and settled down into armchairs on the lawn in front of the chalet. Lights shimmered in the valley. The last of the day lingered in the western sky, and the Milky Way hung low overhead. It was uncannily quiet, even the breeze had fallen silent. Just us and the stars. But not one deigned to fall.

  Sitting like that, heads jerked skywards, was uncomfortable, so we lay ourselves down on the broad, sturdy table. Head to head, ears touching. We talked about anything and everything. Reminisced some more about childhood. Then he told me about his girlfriend. About how much he loves her. Though she no longer does.

  Later it got seriously cold, but we were loath to head back into the warmth: we still hadn’t seen a single star fall over Brentschen.

  Finally we headed back inside to sleep, it was really late now.

  Before going to bed I popped into his room to say good night.

  “You know, Dad, if I ever have a son and he asks me to recall some happy moments with my father, I’ll definitely think back to tonight—to how we lay on the table under the night sky here in Brentschen, watching stars fall.”

  “But not a single one did.”

  “What difference does it make!”

  We were silent for a while. Then I said, “It’s late. Good night! Get some sleep! We’ll talk plenty more tomorrow.”

  “Good night!”

  And then I remembered what I’d been meaning to ask him the whole day, but kept forgetting:

  “Oh yes—tell me, what doesn’t fit into that saucepan that’s big enough to hold everything?”

  “Oh come on, Dad,” he laughed, “it’s simple! That would be the saucepan lid!”

  The lid!

  But of course! How didn’t I twig at once!

  Translated by Leo Shtutin

  The Bell Tower of San Marco

  ‘“Be fruitful and multiply!’ Can that really be all that’s bequeathed to us? Why even the mice and Koch’s microbes honor this behest. But man is infinitely greater than his physical self. And how can you reduce all of me, all my untapped resources, the yearning to accomplish something important, essential, that serves mankind, my people, my country—to propagation!”

  That is what Lydia Kochetkova writes in October 1898, to her future husband, Fritz Brupbacher.

  I first came across this remarkable love story when I was collecting material for my Russian Switzerland. Six thousand letters and postcards are preserved in the archives of the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam.

  Seventeen years of a broken era are captured in this correspondence.

  Brupbacher was almost unknown in Russia, and not even a footnote in Switzerland, yet against the dull background of Swiss politicians, he stood out for an ‘un-Swiss’ trait—his inability to compromise. A doctor in a working class district of Zurich, a deputy to the city council, a dedicated internationalist, essayist, socialist, he was expelled from the Swiss Socialist Party during World War I for his pacifism. Though a founder of the Swiss Communist Party, in 1932 he was also expelled from its ranks for excoriating Stalin. An author of socialist brochures and engaging memoirs, he had a true command of the language, and before his death in January 1945 at age 70, he regretted not having become a writer.

  It’s interesting that on the initiative of this very Fritz Brupbacher, a memorial plaque to Lenin was mounted on Spiegelgasse 14. Fritz knew Lenin and many other Russian revolutionaries, both sung and unsung.

  As a medical student in 1897 in Zurich, Fritz met a Russian girl and fell in love. She became his wife. In his memoirs, “60 Years as a Heretic,” published in 1935, he said of this union, “I was married to the Russian Revolution.”

  Lydia Kochetkova was 25 when she met Brupbacher. Born in Samara, she attended courses for women in Petersburg given by Lesgaft, a famous physician, then studied in Berlin, Geneva, and Berne. It was in Zurich that she took her MD and found the love of her life.

  “A doctor—that’s a path, not a goal,” Lydia writes in an early letter, pointing out to Fritz the difference between Swiss and Russian medical students. “My goal is revolution.”

  Lydia’s idol was Vera Figner, a physician and member of the People’s Will Party, following whose example Lydia came to medical school in Switzerland. In her memoirs, Figner sheds light on the special way Russian students saw their future profession—a doctor could spread propaganda freely among the people.

  The Russian air was filled with revolutionary ideals then. As for the Kochetkov family, they had their own special involvement with the revolutionaries. Though almost nothing is known of Lydia’s father, who died early, her letters reveal that from childhood she was intrigued with the stories of her mother, Anastasia Ivanovna, a native of Irkutsk. She told of how, as a starry-eyed schoolgirl, the great iconoclast Prince Kropotkin, then still a tsar’s officer, asked for her hand, and how her parents refused him. The young Anastasia, who was close to revolutionary circles and herself at one time under secret surveillance, was courted by two prominent members of the People’s Will Party, Lazarev and Shishko. As émigrés in Switzerland, these two influenced Lydia to join its successor, the Socialist Revolutionary Party.

  Even before meeting Fritz, Lydia had a clear purpose in life. “I’m ready to sacrifice everything I have for the sake of my people.”

  It’s no small wonder this Russian woman impressed the young Helvetian. Fritz recalls, “The Russian students despised us Swiss medical students who aimed fo
r a solid profession and a solid income. In Lydia’s eyes, the Swiss, just like the other Western Europeans, had, on the whole, many failings: narrow-mindedness, a fixation on material values, opportunism, crassness and egoism. The Swiss student had his eye on dividends and a profitable marriage, the Russian on altering the world. She infected me with Socialism, had me reading certain books, took me to meetings. I was so dazzled by her and her burning faith in the socialist ideal I was ready to follow her anywhere.”

  A fascination with socialist thinking and the allure of all things Russian were intertwined in his feelings for Lydia. “This Russian woman was for me a complete revelation, a bundle of passion, raw emotions and rare power. Our differences showed up everywhere, everyday, in the way we spoke, and thought, in the smallest detail, even how we prepared for exams: the Swiss took this fortress over a long-month’s siege, the Russians—in a head-on attack.”

  Many years later, when he was trying to make sense of this faith in Socialism gripping the Russian youth, Fritz writes, “For her the people and love of the people was like a religion. But you couldn’t say the word ‘religion’ in her presence. She longed for martyrdom—to be exiled to Siberia or, better still, end up on the gallows. These young Russians were like the early Christians, marching to their execution with tears of joy.”

  Fritz described the ‘altar’ in her tiny room—engravings and photographs of revolutionary martyrs such as Countess Sophia Perovskaya, Vera Figner, and other female terrorists.

  “Socialism for the Russians,” we read further in his memoirs, “really meant a loss of one’s ego through self-abnegation. Everything else was secondary. It was a passion to live for others. Lydia sacrificed her interest in the natural sciences to become a doctor, live among the common people, and devote herself to them. She abhorred tsarism. Her models were the regicides of the Perovskaya circle. This fervor, felt at the core, for self-sacrifice to an idea, this desire to efface her ego confused me and at the same time held something magical for one about whom the world said, ‘Without money, there are no Helvetians.’”