So i f one dwells on all this, it is not necessarily to comply with the native realm's psychological makeup. Perhaps what is responsible for this outpouring is exactly the opposite: the incompatibility of the present with what's remembered. Memory, I suppose, reflects the quality of one's reality no less than utopian thought. The reality I face bears no relation and no correspondence to the room and a half and its two inhabitants, across the ocean and now nonexistent. As alternatives go, I can't think of anything more drastic than where I am at. The difference is that between two hemispheres, between night and day, between a city- scape and a countryside, between the dead and the living. The only points in common are my own frame and a typewriter. Of a different make and with a different typeface.
I suppose that had I been around my parents for the last twelve years of their life, had I been around them when they were dying, the contrast between night and day or between a street in a Russian town and an American country lane would be less sharp; the onslaught of memory would yield to that of utopian thinking. The sheer wear and tear would have dulled the senses enough to perceive the tragedy as a nahtral one and leave it behind in a natural way. However, there are few things more futile than weighing one's options in retrospect; similarly, the good thing about an artificial tragedy is that it makes one pay attention to the artifice. The poor tend to utilize everything. I utilize my sense of guilt.
23
It is an easy sentiment to master. After all, every child feels guilty toward his parents, for somehow he knows that they will die before him. So all he needs to alleviate his guilt is to have them die of natural causes: of an illness, or old age, or both. Still, can one extend this sort of cop-out to the death of a slave? Of someone who was born free but whose freedom was altered?
I narrow this definition of a slave neither for academic reasons nor out of lack of generosity. I am willing to buy that a human being born in slavery knows about freedom either genetically or intellectually: through reading or just by hearsay. Yet I must add that his genetic craving for freedom is, like all cravings, to a certain degree incoherent. It is not the actual memory of his mind or limbs. Hence the crnelty and aimless violence of so many revolts. Hence, too, their defeats, alias tyrannies. Death to such a slave or to his kin may seem a liberation (the famous Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Freel Free! Free at last").
But what about someone born free but dying a slave? Would he or she—and let's keep ecclesiastical notions out of this—think of it as a solace? Well, perhaps. More likely, they would think of it as the ultimate insult, the ultimate irreversible stealing of their freedom. Which is what their kin or their child would think, and which is what it is. The last theft.
I remember how once my mother went to buy a railroad ticket to the south, to the Mineral Waters Sanatorium. She had her twenty-one-day vacation after two straight years in her borough development's office, and she was going to that sanatorium because of her liver (she never learned it was cancer). In the city ticket office, in the long queue where she had already spent three hours, she discovered that her money for the ticket, four hundred rubles, had been stolen. She was inconsolable. She came home and stood in our communal kitchen and cried and cried. I led her to our room and a half; she lay on her bed and kept crying. The reason I remember this is that she never cried, except at funerals.
24
In the end my father and I came up with the money, and she went to the sanatorium. However, it wasn't the lost money she was crying about . . . Tears were infrequent in our family; the same goes to a certain extent for the whole of Russia. "Keep your tears for more grave occasions," she would tell me when I was small. And I am afraid I've succeeded more than she wanted me to.
I suppose she wouldn't approve of me writing all this, either. Nor would, of course, my father. He was a proud man. When something reprehensible or horrendous was drawing near him, his face assumed a sour yet at the same time a challenging expression. It was as if he were saying "Try me" to something that he knew from the threshold was mightier than he. "What else could you expect from this scum?" would be his remark on those occasions, a remark with which he would go into submission.
This was not some brand of stoicism. There was no room for any posture or philosophy, however minimalist, in the reality of that time, which compromised every conviction or scmple by demanding total submission to the sum of their opposites. (Only those who did not return from the camps could claim intransigence; those who did were every bit as pliable as the rest.) Yet that was no cynicism, either.
It was simply an attempt to keep one's back straight in a situation of complete dishonor; to keep one's eyes open. That's why tears were out of the question.
The men of that generation were the either/or men. To their children, much more adept in transactions with their conscience (very profitable at times), these men often seemed simpletons. As I said, they were not terribly self- aware. 'Ve, their children, were brought up—or rather brought ourselves up—to believe in the complexity of the world, in the significance of the nuance, of overtones, of gray areas, of the psychological aspects of this and that. Now, having reached the age that equates us to them, having acquired the same physical mass and wearing clothes their size, we see that the whole thing boils do^ precisely to either/or, to the yes/no principle. It took us nearly a lifetime to learn what they seemed to lrnow from the outset: that the world is a very raw place and doesn't deserve better. That "yes" and "no" pretty well embrace, without anything left out, all that complexity which we were discovering and structuring with such relish, and which nearly cost us our wiUpower.
Had they looked for a motto for their existence, they could have taken a few lines from one of ^knmatova's "Northern Elegies":
Just like a river,
I was deflected by my stalwart era. Tley swapped my life: into a different valley, past different landscapes, it went rolling on. And I don't know my banks or where they are.
They never told me much about their childhood, about the families they were from, about their parents or grandparents. I know only that one of my grandparents (on my mother's side) was a Singer sewing machine salesman in the Baltic provinces of the empire (Lithuania, Latvia, Poland) and that the other (on my father's side) was a print-shop owner in St. Petersburg. This reticence had less to do with amnesia than with the necessity of concealing their class origins during that potent era, in order to survive. Engaging raconteur that my father was, he would be quickly stopped in his reminiscing about his high-school endeavors by the warning shot of my mother's gray eyes. In her turn, she would not even blink at hearing an occasional French expression on a street or coming from some of my friends, although one day I found her with a French edition of my works. \Ve looked at each other; then she silently put the book back on the shelf and left my Lebensraum.
A deflected river nmning to its alien, artificial estuary. Can anyone ascribe its disappearance at this estuary to natural causes? And if one can, what about its course? What about human potential, reduced and misdirected from the outside? Who is there to account for what it has been deflected from? Is there anyone? And while asking these questions, I am not losing sight of the fact that this limited or misdirected life may produce in its course yet another life, mine for instance, which, were it not precisely for that reduction of options, wouldn't have taken place to begin with, and no questions would be asked. No, I am aware of the law of probability. I don't wish that my parents had never met. I am asking these questions precisely because I am a tributary of a turned, deflected river. In the end, I suppose, I am talking to myself.