Now my mother and my father are dead. I stand on the Atlantic seaboard: there is a great deal of water separating me from two surviving aunts and my cousins: a real chasm, big enough to confuse even death. Now I can walk around in my socks to my heart's content, for I have no relatives on this continent. The only death in the family I can now incur is presumably my own, although that would mean mixing up transmitter with receiver. The odds of that merger are small, and that's what distinguishes electronics from superstition. Still, if I don't tread these broad Canadian-maple floorboards in my socks, it's neither because of this certitude nor out of an instinct for self-preservation, but because my mother wouldn't approve of it. I guess I want to keep things the way they were in our family, now that I am what's left of it.
2
There were three of us in that room and a half of ours: my father, my mother, and I. A family, a typical Russian family of the time. The time was after the war, and very few people could afford more than one child. Some of them couldn't even afford to have the father alive or present: great terror and war took their toll in big cities, in my hometown especially. So we should have considered ourselves lucky, especially since we were Jews. All three of us survived the war (and I say "all three" because I, too, was born before it, in 1940); my parents, however, survived the thirties also.
I guess they considered themselves lucky, although they never said as much. In general, they were not terribly self- aware, except when they grew old and malaises began to beset them. Even then, they wouldn't talk about themselves and death in that way that terrifies a listener or prods him to compassion. They would simply grumble, or complain addresslessly about their aches, or discuss at length some medicine or other. The closest my mother would ever come to uttering something of the sort would be while pointing at an extremely delicate set of china, saying: This will become yours when you get married or when . . . and she would interrupt herself. And, once, I remember her on the phone talking to some distant friend of hers who I was told was ilclass="underline" I remember my mother emerging from the telephone booth on the street, where I was waiting for her, with a somewhat unfamiliar look in her so familiar eyes, behind her tortoiseshell-rimmed glasses. I leaned toward her (I was already a good deal taller) and asked what the woman had said, and my mother replied, staring aimlessly ahead: "She knows that she is dying and was crying into the phone."
They took everything as a matter of course: the system, their powerlessness, their poverty, their wayward son. They simply tried to make the best of everything: to keep food on the table—and whatever that food was, to tum it into morsels; to make ends meet—and although we always lived from payday to payday, to stash away a few rubles for the kid's movies, museum trips, books, dainties. What dishes, utensils, clothes, linen we had were always clean, polished, ironed, patched, starched. The tablecloth was always spotless and crisp, the lampshade above it dusted, the parquet shining and swept.
The amazing thing is that they were never bored. Tired, yes, but not bored. Most of their time at home, they were on their feet: cooking, washing, circulating between the communal kitchen of our apartment and our room and a half, fiddling with this or that item of the household. When they were seated, it was of course for meals, but mainly I remember my mother in a chair, bent over her manual-cum- pedal Singer sewing machine, fixing our clothes, turning old shirt collars inside out, repairing or readjusting old coats. As for my father, his only time in a chair was when he was reading the paper, or else at his desk. Sometimes in the evening they would watch a movie or a concert on our 1952 TV set. Then they would also be seated . .. This way, seated in a chair in the empty room and a half, a neighbor found my father dead a year ago.
3
He had outlived his wife by thirteen months. Out of seventy-eight years of her life and eighty of his, I've spent only thirty-two years with them. I know almost nothing about how they met, about their courtship; I don't even know in what year they were married. Nor do I know the way they lived the last eleven or twelve years of their lives, the years without me. Since I am never to learn it, I'd better assume that the routine was the usual, that perhaps they were even better off without me: in terms both of money and of not having to worry about my being rearrested.
Except that I couldn't help them in their old age; except tiat I wasn't there when they were dying. I am saying this not so much out of a sense of guilt as because of the rather egotistical desire of a child to follow his parents through all the stages of their life; for every child, one way or another, repeats his parents' progress. I could argue that, after aU, one wants to le^ from one's parents about one's own future, one's ovwn aging; one wants to learn from them also the ultimate lesson: how to die. Even if one doesn't want any of these, one knows that one learns from them, however unwittingly. "Shall I look this way when I am old, too? Is this cardiac—or any other—problem hereditary?"
I don't and I never will know how they felt during those last years of their life. How many times they were scared, how many times they felt prepared to die, how they felt then, reprieved, how they would resume hoping that the three of us would get together again. "Son," my mother would say over the telephone, "the only thing I want from this life is to see you again. That's the only thing that keeps me going." And a minute later: "What were you doing five minutes ago, before you called?" "ActuaUy, I was doing the dishes." "Oh, that's very good. It's a very good thing to do: the dishes. Sometimes it's awfully therapeutic."
4
Our room and a haH was part of a huge enfilade, one-third of a block in length, on the northern side of a six-story building that faced three streets and a square at the same time. The building was one of those tremendous cakes in so-called Moorish style that in Northern Europe marked the tum of the century. Erected in 1903, the year of my father's birth, it was the architectural sensation of the St. Petersburg of that period, and Akhmatova once told me that her parents took her in a carriage to see this wonder. On its western side, facing one of the most famous avenues of Russian literature, Liteiny Prospect, Alexander Blok had an apartment at one time. As for our enfilade, it was occupied by the couple that dominated the pre-revolutionary Russian literary scene as well as the intellectual climate of Russian emigration in Paris later on, in the twenties and the thirties: by Dmitry Merezhkovsky and Zinaida Gippius. And it was from our room and a half's balcony that the larva-like Zinka shouted abuse to the revolutionary sailors.
After the Revolution, in accordance with the policy of "densening up" the bourgeoisie, the enfilade was cut up into pieces, with one family per room. Walls were erected between the rooms—at first of plywood. Subsequently, over the years, boards, brick, and stucco would promote these partitions to the status of architectural norm. If there is an infinite aspect to space, it is not its expansion but its reduction. If only because the reduction of space, oddly enough, is always more coherent. It's better structured and has more names: a cell, a closet, a grave. Expanses have only a broad gesture.
In the U.S.S.R., the living quarters' minimum per person is 9 square meters. We should have considered ourselves lucky, because due to the oddity of our portion of the enfilade, the three of us wound up with a total of 40 meters. That excess had to do also with the fact that we had ob- taincd this place as the result of my parents' giving up the two separate rooms in different parts of town in which they had lived before they got married. This concept of exchange —or, better still, swap (because of the finality of such exchange )—is something there is no way to convey to an outsider, to a foreigner. Property laws are arcane everywhere, but some of them are more arcane than others, especially when your landlord is the state. Money has nothing to do with it, for instance, since in a totalitarian state income brackets are of no great variety—in other words, every person is as poor as the next. You don't buy your living quarters: at best, you are entitled to the square equivalent of what you had before. If there are two of you, and you decide to live together, you are therefore entitled to an equivalent of the square sum total of your previous residencies. And it is the clerks in the borough property office who decide what you are going to get. Bribery is of no use, since the hierarchy of those clerks is, in its own turn, terribly arcane and their initial impulse is to give you less. The swaps take years, and your only ally is fatigue; i.e., you may hope to wear them down by refusing to move into something quantitatively inferior to what you previously had. Apart from pure arithmetic, what goes into their decision is a vast variety of assumptions never articulated in law, about your age, nationality, race, occupation, the age and sex of your child, social and territorial origins, not to mention the personal impression you make, etc. Only the clerks know what is available, only they judge the equivalence and can give or take a few square meters here and there. And what a difference those few square meters make! They can accommodate a bookshelf, or, better yet, a desk.