As I waited for his visit, I gradually started getting out and about, venturing further and further from the village each day, now taking the level road towards Jeizinen, now the mountain track in the direction of Leukerbad, and every time I imagined how we’d stroll around these parts together. I walked at a leisurely pace, often stopping. The stitches itched unbearably—I wanted to pick the plaster off and tear at the scars with my nails.
Then my son emailed to let me know he was already on his way. His short message ended with the following riddle: imagine a saucepan big enough to hold anything you like—a chicken, a whole bull, a house, the entire Earth, even the entire universe. Yet what can such a saucepan never hold?
Let me explain. The thing is, his mother and I divorced when he was seven. I became a pop-in father. And, later, a fly-in father. Things were probably better that way, for everybody and for him first and foremost. When his mother and I fought—undignifiedly, inanely, smashing crockery and slamming doors—he didn’t cry, just threw himself now at her, now at me, his hands clenched into little fists. Living like this was impossible. My leaving home did us—my son and myself—a world of good. Had we continued to live together, I would have only shouted at him: put your shoes away! Or, Do your homework! Or, Stop badgering me, can’t you see I’m writing! But because I’d left, our get-togethers throughout his childhood were about him and for him only, and I never told him to stop badgering me. Not a single time. It was worth leaving home for that alone.
In periods away from one another we’d exchange letters. About anything and everything. I thought up various charades for him, crosswords, riddles. In each letter he’d pose tricky questions of his own, such as: If steam is lighter than water, then why is ice not heavier than water, but lighter?
He’s all grown-up now, but he still rounded off that email with one of his riddles.
He’s twenty-three now, an adult.
By the age of sixteen I already knew everything about myself. I knew what I wanted from this life: to write books and to travel. And I knew that this was impossible. Because I was born into a country where whatever I might write would never be published, and beyond whose borders I would never be allowed to travel. This was a slave-country, and my slave-parents had birthed me into bondage. I knew exactly what I wanted, but it was all impossible—and I felt like a disconsolate wretch.
My son, in contrast, has it all within his grasp: he’s already travelled half the world, he writes, makes films, gives concerts of his own music. But he still doesn’t truly know what he wants from this life. Which makes him feel wretched, too.
Happiness, most likely, is conditional neither on liberty nor on its lack.
There I was, strolling along the track in the direction of Leukerbad, the air laden with the sharp aromas of the warm sunlit forest, of pine resin and wild strawberries, and I pondered what it was that wouldn’t fit into a saucepan big enough to hold the Milky Way, all the galaxies, and the entire universe from beginning to end?
And then I encountered my father. He was walking towards me, a rucksack on his shoulders, sturdy mountain boots on his feet, sun-bronzed, healthy, young. This was my father, but not as I knew him in his final years, a grey-haired, gnarly guzzler. This was the father I remembered from my childhood. I stopped, astounded, while he strode over to me, nimbly and vigorously, as does a weary traveler at the conclusion of a whole day spent on mountain paths, with the end of a long, splendid hike finally in sight.
Drawing level with me, he smiled and said, “Grüezi!”
“Grüezi!” I replied.
And he strode on towards Brentschen.
The fact that my father had spoken to me in Swiss German brought me back to reality. Needless to say, this young man, many years my junior, could not be my father, delivered to the flames of a Moscow crematorium in his sailor’s uniform seventeen years previously.
During the war my father had been a submariner in the Baltic, and a photograph of his Shchuka hung on our wall. That Daddy had a submarine was a source of great pride for me as a child, and I’d constantly be making drawings of the photo in my school exercise book, carefully inscribing the number Shch-310 on the submarine’s nose. Every ninth of May—Victory Day—my father would get out his sailor’s uniform, which he was always having altered to accommodate his ever-growing belly, and pinned on all his badges. Later I grew up a bit and realized that in 1944 and 1945 my father helped sink German ships which were evacuating refugees from Riga and Tallinn. Hundreds if not thousands of people met their deaths in the waters of the Baltic—for which my father was decorated. I’ve long since ceased being proud of him, but nor do I condemn him. There was a war on, and my father won in that war. He was avenging his brother.
My father went off to war as a volunteer at the age of eighteen—to avenge Boris, he would tell me. His older brother was killed in the summer of 1941.
As a child I’d spend every summer at my grandmother’s, in the holiday village of Udelnaya near Moscow. A wall in her room was hung with old photos. One showed her sons: two teenage brothers sitting in embrace, head to head, floppy ears touching. Nowadays everyone always smiles on photos, but these two gazed seriously into the camera as if they had foreknowledge of everything that would soon happen to them. Another snapshot showed a youth in headphones: a ham-radio aficionado, Boris was training to be a telephonist.
I remember Grandma unfolding the frayed old sheet of paper marked “NOTIFICATION,” kissing it and wiping away tears. He was twenty. Looking at my son today, I find this simply impossible to imagine. He’s just a boy still, no more than a kid. But back then, Boris seemed like a big grown-up hero to me.
My grandfather was a peasant from down Tambov way. He was arrested in the midst of collectivization in 1930. Grandma would tell me about how, when requisitioners arrived at their yard to take away the cow, he became indignant at being left with nothing to feed two little children. He was arrested and sent off to Siberia to build the Baikal–Amur Mainline. He managed to pass on two short letters before vanishing. When Grandma was dying, aged ninety-five, her mind started going a bit, and everything that happened to her in 1930 began resurfacing. I’d phone her, I remember, and at first she’d speak to me as normal, but then she’d suddenly start asking, “Who is this? Misha? Who’s Misha?” And I’d tell her, “It’s me, Misha!” Her husband, my grandfather, was also called Mikhail, and she’d scream down the phone, “What are you doing? Leave him be! Don’t take him away! Let him go! Misha, where are they taking you?” She had been transported back to that year, and her husband was being arrested all over again. To avoid dying of hunger, Grandma had to flee the village with her two children, my father and Uncle Borya. She found a job as a cleaner near Moscow before spending the rest of her life as a kindergarten nurse.
On every form he filled out, my father held back the fact that he was the son of an enemy of the people, and he lived his whole life in fear that this would come out into the open. It’s so important for a son to be proud of his father. But it was fear, not pride, that dwelt in my father’s soul.
That frayed and yellowed document Grandma kissed and cried over wasn’t actually a notice of death, but a notification that Boris was missing in action somewhere in the Kandalaksha area. Such an odd word that it stuck in my memory. This is a small town in Karelia. Now I realize she was forever hoping that he hadn’t perished, that he was still alive somewhere. “Missing in action”—what does this mean, exactly? Could mean anything. And she thought, What if he’s still alive, what if we’re to meet again? And my father harboured the same hope about his brother.