‘And don’t look to the Church, that KGB in silk cassocks.’
Galvanised, my mother stood up. In a firmer than usual voice she told Anna she could use her help in the kitchen to roll the last batch of shortbread. ‘Anyushka, do you mind?’ Anna didn’t.
‘Ah, the kitchen cabinet’s in session!’ my father chortled.
‘War cabinet more like.’
I gave an ostentatious head-cocked one-shoulder shrug. Now you’ve upset her. Mocking her religion. Anna’s too. Fierce whispers carried from the stove. Presently a two-woman force field, carrying trays of biscuits and tea, stepped through the door. Anna was blinking away tears; my mother radiated fury. Standing still, they stared down my father. He cowered in his chair.
My mother in particular was keen to set another date for the following month. When they left Anna waited a minute to start her finger-wagging, gut-wobbling Sergey imitation, aping his emphysemic wheeze. Her raw contempt was disconcerting. I knew then she was completely unafraid of her louche father-in-law. Measured against her father, that paragon Anatoly Ivanovich, I have no yardstick. Describing my filial sentiment as begrudging admiration might be putting it too strongly.
Most of the time Anna has Sergey where she wants him, even when he nudges over the line – he will from time to time, the old prick. Cross one woman, cross both.
She panted for breath. ‘Best take-off gets oral first.’
‘Mock the great and powerful, that’s the only way. They all topple in the end. You’ve been practising in the shower, I know when I’m beaten. So how about we declare it a draw? Sixty-nine each. Fair’s fair.’ I’ve taught her the lewd English meaning, along with other choice expressions, for our private delectation.
She giggled, looked up, half-yelled to our elderly neighbour, apartment block manager and bane of our lives directly above. ‘Maria Alexandrovna!’ Gave it full throttle. ‘Seek-sti-nain you hor-r-r-bag!!’
‘Seven out of ten for pronunciation.’
‘You’re a hard marker. Have a listen. I reckon she has her dictionary open.’
Maria’s cane was about to punch through the ceiling.
With minor variations, alternating between apartments – this dacha sojourn is a six-monthly event – our recent get-togethers with my parents follow the same script. While at work my father insists I confide my marital ups and downs, offering advice by turns shrewd and jovial. If – when – Anna falls pregnant, my parents are determined to be close by. Even hasten the event by some kind of weird osmosis. How else to explain these odd, stilted rituals?
Often I wonder what Anna thinks she married into. Paraphrasing the opening line of Anna Karenina, to which end of the happiness spectrum does the Kurguzikov family belong? We are intellectuals floating in the middle. On television we watch sophisticated adaptations of Sherlock Holmes instead of the unfashionable boy-meets-tractor, falls-in-love, lives-happily-ever-after, that her father favoured. We smooth over flaws with choice cuts of meat, tongue, lean sturgeon, tubs of orange caviar from Kamchatka and the Far East. Georgian red wine and five-star brandy from Dagestan adorn the tablecloth. Anna has acquired a taste for both.
Filial relations are the enigmatic dyad in the matrix. Perhaps my mother, a subdued spirit outside her kitchen domain, recruited Anna to make the boys behave. When Anna and I still lived at my parents’ apartment, my father loved taking out the Scrabble set and the game forked across the board. Sometimes – not so often as to be flagrantly rude, and never in my mother’s presence – my father switched to his second language and worked me over, English subtext to the sparring. Anna, whose residue of high school English was sufficient to follow from the sidelines, said Scrabble reminded her of Olympic boxing – three-minute mismatches, the superior fighter taunting his opponent with deft jabs, holding in reserve the knockout blow, the loser striving to stay on his feet and absorb the punishment until the final bell, valour intact. My father always won on points, whereupon he would go out on the balcony, on warm evenings strip to his singlet, drink beer, smoke, pace up and down and limber up for the next pretender.
Squirrels cavort over the dacha roof. Downstairs is quiet.
An older memory surfaces – riding in the back seat of my father’s Trabant. Understanding perhaps half, thirteen-year-old me listened as our guest, an Australian exchange student at Sergey’s institute, sandy-haired, shiny-eyed, drinking everything in, David, relieved to break into ebullient English, recounted his first foray into a beriozka, a shop that stocked Western products at marked-up prices. Intent on buying a tub of yogurt, just off the plane and still jet-lagged, David explained to the bemused cashier that he was after a long-life variety, dolgoigrayushie. He was doing okay until he inserted the infelicitous preservativy – iogurt s preservativami – condom-flavoured yogurt. My father chortled, I joined in. A rare bonding moment. I could count them on one hand.
The previous evening my father brought David home for a dinner my mother had queued and prepared for all day – pork pie, cabbage rolls, salted herring, chocolate sponge cake. My parents had speculated whether he understood the occasion was a cultural exam. Straight away and without prompting he removed his shoes in the hallway (amazing how many Western guests didn’t). My mother’s total lack of English, if anything, complemented David’s mellifluous, almost without accent, Russian. Perhaps one or two previous students had matched his pure language skills, but David simultaneously exhibited a grasp of the finer points of etiquette or superstition they had forgotten, failed to consider, or were ignorant of. One lovely and very gifted young German brought eight yellow flowers – the colour for divorce, even number portending calamity.
David kept eye contact during my father’s toast to the occasion, reciprocated the health of his hosts and riffed on friendship bridging ideological differences.
Meal underway, David prised syllables from my pre-intermediate English.
‘How is school?’
‘Good.’
‘Your favourite group?’
‘Deep People.’
‘Purple? Right, yep, they were huge early in the decade, still kicking on obviously. And what do you like for breakfast?’
‘Porridge. Oats or… what is word? Se-mo-li-na. I like them the same.’ I played it safe. I wanted to say instead, Whatever Mum puts on my plate. What do you think? but that was too easy to mangle, not to mention a degree of rudeness that would have grounded me for a week.
Dinner over, David presented me with an LP.
‘Pardon my ignorance, David,’ my father asked, in English, ‘but who’s Slim Dusty?’
For my benefit David reverted to Russian. ‘Our very own bard. Australia’s answer to Vladimir Vysotsky if you like. He sings about wrestling kangaroos, Aboriginal rituals, trucks screaming down hills. Untranslatable stuff like that. A few years back I hitchhiked five hundred kilometres across the Western Australian desert – think Kazakhstan – and the driver only had one cassette, Slim’s Greatest Hits. Either he grows on you or you jump out of the cabin. I stayed in the cabin.’