His was Number 11, I think; ours was Number 27, and that was at the end of the street, which flowed into the cathedral square. Yet, since our building was at the street's intersection with the fabled Liteiny Prospect, our postal address read: Liteiny Pr. #24, Apt. 28. This is where we received our mail; this is what I wrote on the envelopes addressed to my parents. I am mentioning it here not because it has any specific significance but because my pen, presumably, will never write this address again.
9
Oddly, the furniture we had matched the exterior and the interior of the building. It was as busy with curves, and as monumental as the stucco molding on the fat;ade or the panels and pilasters protruding from the walls inside, skeined with plaster garlands of some geometrical fruits. Both the outside and the inner decor were of a light-brown, cocoa-cum-milk shade. Our two huge, cathedral-like chests of drawers, however, were of black varnished oak; yet they belonged to the same period, the tum of the century, as did the building itself. This was what perhaps favorably disposed the neighbors toward us from the outset, albeit unwittingly. And this was why, perhaps, after barely a year in that building, we felt we had lived there forever. The sensation that the chests had found their home, or the other way around, somehow made us realize that we, too, were settled, that we were not to move again.
Those ten-foot-high, two-story chests (you'd have to take off the corniced top from the elephant-footed bottom when moving) housed nearly everything our family had amassed in the course of its existence. The role played elsewhere by the attic or the basement, in our case was performed by the chests. My father's various cameras, developing and printing paraphernalia, prints themselves, dishes, china, linen, tablecloths, shoe boxes with his shoes now too small for him yet still too large for me, tools, batteries, his old Navy tunics, binoculars, family albums, yellowed illustrated supplements, my mother's hats and scarves, some silver Solingen razor blades, defunct flashlights, his military decorations, her motley kimonos, their mutual correspondence, lorgnettes, fans, other memorabilia—all that was stored in the cavernous depths of these chests, yielding, when you'd open one of their doors, a bouquet of mothballs, old leather, and dust. On the top of the lower part, as if on a mantelpiece, sat two crystal carafes containing liqueurs, and a glazed porcelain figurine of two tipsy Chinese fishermen dragging their catch. My mother would wipe the dust off them twice a week.
With hindsight, the content of these chests could be compared to our joined, collective subconscious; at the time, this thought wouldn't have crossed my mind. To say the least, all these things were part of my parents' consciousness, tokens of their memory: of places and of times by and large preceding me; of their common and separate past, of their own youth and childhood, of a different era, almost of a different century. With the benefit of the same hindsight, I would add: of their freedom, for they were born and grew up free, before what the witless scum call the Revolution, but what for them, as for generations of others, meant slavery.
10
write this in English because I want to grant them a margin of freedom: the margin whose width depends on the number of those who may be willing to read this. I want Maria Volpert and Alexander Brodsky to acquire reality under "a foreign code of conscience," I want English verbs of motion to describe their movements. This won't resurrect them, but English grammar may at least prove to be a better escape route from the chimneys of the state crematorium than the Russian. To write about them in Russian would be only to further their captivity, their reduction to insignificance, resulting in mechanical annihilation. I know that one shouldn't equate the state with language but it was in Russian that two old people, shuffling through numerous state chancelleries and ministries in the hope of obtaining a permit to go abroad for a visit to see their only son before they died, were told repeatedly, for twelve years in a row, that the state considers such a visit "unpurposeful." To say the least, the repetition of this utterance proves some familiarity of the state with the Russian language. Besides, even if I had written all this in Russian, these words wouldn't see the light of day under the Russian sky. Who would read them then? A handful of emigres whose parents either have died or will die under similar circumstances? They know this story only too well. They know what it feels like not to be allowed to sec their mothers or fathers on their deathbed; the silence that follows their request for an emergency visa to attend a relative's funeral. And then it's too late, and a man or a woman puts the receiver down and walks out of the door into the foreign afternoon feeling something neither langiage has words for, and for which no howl will suffice, either ... What could I possibly tell them? In what way could I console them? No country has mastered the art of destroying its subjects' souls as well as Russia, and no man with a pen in his hand is up to mending them; no, this is a job for the Almighty only, this is what He has all that time of His for. May English then house my dead. In Russian I am prepared to read, write verses or letters. For Maria Volpert and Alexander Brodsky, though, English offers a better semblance of afterlife, maybe the only one there is, save my very self. And as far as the latter is concerned, writing this in this language is like doing those dishes: it's therapeutic.
11
My father was a journalist—a newspaper photographer, to be more precise—although he wrote articles as well. As he wrote mostly for small dailies that are never read anyway, most of his articles would start with "Heavy, storm-laden clouds hang over the Baltic ... " confident that the weather in our parts would make this opening newsworthy or pertinent. He held two degrees: in geography, from Leningrad University, and in journalism, from the School of Red Journalism. He enrolled in the latter when it was made clear to him that his chances to travel, especially abroad, weren't worth reckoning: as a Jew, a son of a print-shop owner, and a non-member of the Party.
Journalism (to a certain extent) and the war ( substantially) restored the balance. He covered one-sixth of the earth's surface (the standard quantitative definition of the territory of the U.S.S.R.) and a great deal of water. Although he was assigned to the Navy, the war started for him in 1940, in Finland, and ended in 1948, in China, where he was sent with a bunch of military advisers to help Mao in his endeavors and from where those tipsy porcelain fishermen and the china sets my mother wanted me to have when I got married came from. In between, he was escorting the Allies' PQs in the Barents Sea, defending and losing Sevastopol on the Black Sea, joining—after his torpedo boat was sunk—the then Marines. During the siege of Leningrad, he was dispatched to the Leningrad front, took the best pictures I've seen in print of the city under siege, and participated in the siege's dislodging. (This part of the war, I believe, mattered to him most, since it was too close to his family, to his home. Still, for all his proximity, he lost his apartment and his only sister: to bombs and to hunger.) Afterward, he was sent back to the Black Sea, landed at the ill-famed Malaya Zemlya, and held it; then, as the front advanced westward, went with the first detachment of torpedo boats to Rumania, landed there, and, for a short time, was even the military governor of Constanza. "We liberated Rumania," he'd boast sometimes, and proceed to recall his encounters with King Michael. That was the only king he had ever seen; Mao, Chiang Kai-shek, not to mention Stalin, he regarded as upstarts.