Buch lesen: «Maybe Esther»

CHAPTER 1
AN EXEMPLARY STORY

FAMILY TREE

A spruce is standing lonely.

—HEINRICH HEINE

As a child I thought a family tree was something like a Christmas tree, a tree with decorations from old boxes—some baubles break, fragile as they are, some angels are ugly and sturdy and remain intact through every move. In any case, a Christmas tree was the only family tree we had, bought new every year then thrown away, a day before my birthday.

I had thought that telling the story of the few people who happened to be my relatives was all that was needed to conjure up the entire twentieth century. Some of my family members were born to pursue their callings in life in the unswerving, implicit belief that they would fix the world. Others seemed to have come out of nowhere; they did not put down roots, they ran back and forth, barely touching the ground, and hung in the air like a question, like a skydiver caught in a tree. My family had just about everything, I had arrogantly thought, a farmer, many teachers, a provocateur, a physicist, and a poet—and plenty of legends.

We had

a revolutionary who joined the Bolsheviks and changed his name in the underground to one we have been using legally for close to a hundred years

several workers in a shoe factory in Odessa, about whom nothing is known

a physicist who ran an experimental turbine factory in Kharkiv and vanished during the purges; his brother-in-law was told to turn against him in court because party loyalty was gauged by a person’s willingness to sacrifice his own family members

a war hero named Gertrud, the husband of my aunt Lida, who was born when work was declared an end in itself, at first everyone worked a lot, then too much, and later still more, because exemplary achievements replaced norms and work became the meaning of life in the nation of proletarians and supermen, and so it came about that my future uncle was named Geroy Truda at birth, hero of labor, work hero, abbreviated to Gertrud

then there were Arnold, Ozjel, Zygmunt, Misha, Maria, Maybe Esther, maybe a second Esther and Madam Siskind, a deaf-mute student of Ozjel who sewed clothing for the entire city

many teachers who founded orphanages throughout Europe and taught deaf-mute children

Anna and Lyolya, who died in Babi Yar, and all the others there

a phantom named Judas Stern, my great-uncle

a peacock my grandparents bought for the deaf-mute children so they could enjoy its beauty

a Rosa and a Margarita, my floral grandmas

Margarita received a letter of recommendation for party membership in 1923, directly from Molotov, the future Soviet minister of foreign affairs, that’s how we tell the story, as if it showed that we were always at the center of the action

my grandmother Rosa, who had the loveliest name of all speech therapists and waited for her husband longer than Penelope had

my grandfather Vasily, who went off to war and did not return to my grandmother Rosa for forty-one years. She never forgave him for his long odyssey, but—in our family there is always someone who says but—but, this someone said, they kissed, at the kiosk next to the subway station, when they were both over seventy, the Hotel Tourist was under construction just then, but Grandfather, my mother said, Grandfather wasn’t able to leave the apartment anymore back then, and the Hotel Tourist wasn’t built until later

my other grandfather, the revolutionary who had not only changed his name but also given his mother a new name in every Soviet questionnaire, depending on the way the political wind was blowing, his employment, and his taste in literature, until he came up with Anna Arkadyevna, that was Anna Karenina’s name, who thus became my great-grandmother

We were happy, and everything within me resisted Leo Tolstoy’s pronouncement that happy families are alike in their happiness and only the unhappy ones are unique, a pronouncement that lured us into a trap and brought out our penchant for unhappiness, as though only unhappiness was worth words, but happiness hollow.

NEGATIVE NUMBERS

My big brother taught me the negative numbers, he told me about black holes, as an introduction to a way of life. He conjured up a parallel universe where he was forever beyond reach, and I was left with the negative numbers. The only cousin I knew about was someone I rarely saw, even more rarely than her mother Lida, my mother’s big sister. My strict uncle, my father’s big brother, during his rare visits, gave me physics problems to solve on the topic of perpetual motion, as though constant motion could gloss over his absence in our lives. My two babushkas lived with us, but weren’t all there: I was still a child when they reached the full incapacity of their advanced age. Other babushkas baked piroshki and cake, knitted warm sweaters and colorful caps, some even socks—socks, the aerobatics of knitting, vysshiy pilotazh, as people used to say. They brought the children to school and to music class, they picked them up, and in the summer they waited in their gardens for their grandchildren, in their dachas, little country huts. My babushkas lived with us on the seventh floor, and could not put down roots in the concrete. Both of them had floral names, and I secretly thought that the mallows that grew in front of our fourteen-floor building were connivers in Babushka Rosa and Babushka Margarita’s plot to retreat into the plant kingdom.

They didn’t have all their marbles, you might say, though in Russian you don’t use the expression “all their marbles.” Russians would ask, Don’t you have them all at home? I was afraid of this question, although my babushkas were almost always at home, probably for my protection, even so, this not having them all at home, or even just the word “all,” alarmed me, as though the others were privy to something about us that I wasn’t, and knew who or what was actually missing.

Sometimes I thought I knew. Two of my grandparents were born in the nineteenth century, and it seemed to me that in the turmoil of the era one generation had been lost or skipped over, they truly were not “at home”; my friends’ great-grandparents were younger than my grandparents, and it was left to me to foot the bill for two generations and face the music. I was the very youngest in a line of the youngest. I was the youngest there had ever been.

The feeling of loss worked its way, without warning, into my otherwise cheerful world, hovering over me, spreading its wings, depriving me of air and light, on account of a deficiency that may not have existed. Sometimes it struck like a bolt of lightning, a sudden swoon, throwing me off balance and leaving me gasping for breath, flailing about to regain my equilibrium, hit by a bullet that was never fired off, no one had said hands up!

These existential gymnastics in the struggle for balance struck me as a part of the family heritage, an innate reflex. In English class we practiced hands up, to the sides, forward, down. I always figured that the word gymnastics came from the word hymn, as in hymnastics, in Russian both words start with a g, gimnastika and gimn, and I eagerly extended my hands upward in an attempt to touch the imperceptible sheath of the heavens.

There were many who had even fewer relatives than I. Some children had no brothers or sisters, no babushka or parents, and there were children who had sacrificed themselves for the homeland in the war, these children were brave heroes, they became our idols, they were always with us. We were not allowed to forget their names even at night, they had died many years before our birth, but back then we had no “back then,” only a “now,” in which war losses were said to constitute an inexhaustible supply of our own happiness, because the only reason we were alive, we were told, was that they had died for us, and we needed to be eternally grateful to them, for our peaceful normality and for absolutely everything. I grew up not in the cannibalistic but the vegetarian years, as Akhmatova dubbed them (and we all echoed her), and we attributed all losses to the war that was long since over, the war that bore no article or adjective, we simply said war; there aren’t any articles in Russian anyway, and we did not specify which war, because we thought that there was only one, erroneously, since during our happy childhood our state was waging another war, down in the faraway south, for our safety, we were told, and for the freedom of others, a war that we were not allowed to acknowledge in spite of the daily losses, and I, too, did not acknowledge it until I was ten years old and saw the zinc casket in front of our apartment building, which contained the remains of a nineteen-year-old neighbor, a boy I could not recall even then, but I recall his mother to this day.

I had no reason to suffer. Yet I did suffer, from early on, although I was happy and loved, and surrounded by friends, embarrassed to be suffering, but suffering still with a loneliness that ranged from razor-sharp to bleakly bitter and I thought it stemmed only from a feeling of missing out on something. The luxurious dream of a big family at a long table followed me with the persistence of a ritual.

And yet our living room was full of my father’s friends and my mother’s adult students, dozens of students who always stood by her until in time, there were several generations of them at our table, and we took the same photographs as other families: against the backdrop of the dark floral curtains lots of merry, slightly overexposed faces, all turned toward the camera, at a long, beautifully decorated table. I don’t know exactly when I first picked up on the hints of discord during my family’s loud, exuberant festivities.

You could count the list of those who could be considered part of my family on the fingers of two hands. I had no need to practice the piano scale of aunt, uncle, cousin, first cousin once removed and her husband, cousin, and great-uncle—up and down, up and down, and I was terrified of that piano, that aggressive totality of the keyboard.

In an earlier time, before we had our big dinner parties, a large family was a curse, because relatives could be members of the White Army, saboteurs, noblemen, kulaks, overeducated “enemies of the people” living abroad, their children, and other dubious characters, and everyone was under suspicion, so families suffered a convenient loss of memory, often in order to save themselves, even though it rarely helped, and on special occasions, any relatives who might fit these categories were generally forgotten, often hidden from the children, and families dwindled; whole branches of the family were erased from memory, extended families were pared down until there was nothing left of them but the joke about the two men with the same last name who are asked if they’re related. Certainly not, they reply: we don’t even have the same last name!