Grebenshikov was singing and I was growing up. He was singing, and we were leaving. In those final months in Kharkov, his words bared every nerve ending inside me, but, in a strange way, they also soothed me. After all, freedom was all we had now, and BG was assuring me that this was more than enough. For years after I arrived in Australia I listened to Equinox and to the new Aquarium albums I copied from fresh arrivals. I needed BG badly. I was nostalgic as hell, of course, but I also depended on Aquarium to help me orient myself in my new life.
My parents wanted my sister and me – and the children they hoped we would eventually bring into this world – to be free people. They did their bit, much more than their bit, in fact. They left the only home they had known. They took us out of a place where they believed the very notion of freedom was rendered absurd and laughable. It was our solo from now on. In Australia, I needed Grebenshikov to remind me of what real freedom felt like, as opposed to the absence of external constraints. It surprised me at first. Here was a country that allowed its citizens to choose where they lived; where the Market, not the State, was the biggest source of censorship (a fact that was very hard for citizens of an ex-totalitarian nation to see in their first few years, such were its charms); where you would never find three generations thrown together in a single room crisscrossed with partitions (unless, of course, they were black Australians or refugees). Even the bureaucrats smiled and behaved themselves, on the whole. The first officer from social security my family encountered astonished my parents (and me, for that matter) by sporting differently coloured earrings (blue and green). Libraries were filled with new, or at least new-ish, books. Shops were filled with gleaming produce (to Australians, fresh fruit and vegetables were obviously a Godgiven right). Driving on city roads did not bring on instant contractions. Ideology did not seem to be playing first violin. Australia looked like Grebenshikov’s archetypal country of gold over blue against the green. (Only it was not. No country ever is.)
Towards the end of Day Two in Moscow, Billie and I filled our wallets with American dollars and took two trains in silence to the specialist travel agency, which occupied a rented room in an institute to do with some kind of chemical materials or processes. Here the new and the old Moscow met. We walked in through the entrance, which was surrounded by large stray dogs oozing aggressive desperation. We paid, we thanked, we walked back respectfully past the dog army, and the next day our stamped passports were waiting for us. Of course, we told Petya and Natasha about our friendly bureaucrat who spoke in riddles, but we made a point of not making a big deal about what happened. What happened really? Nothing happened. Nothing of any note.
4
ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE
NO, NOT A MATRIARCH, that is not the right word, but there has to be a term to describe this woman past her ninetieth birthday, who carries within herself not simply the weight of nearly a century lived to the bone but also the essence of dignity and strength. There are many people who do not consent to turning into frail little daffodils in their old age, many of them remarkable in their own way, but Marina Gustavovna is a different species. Even if you knew nothing about nothing, you could tell this much about her: here is a woman who has not been bent much less broken by the dog of the Soviet century, with its absolute contempt for human life, for the bonds of families and friendships, and for the singular gifts of human mind and imagination. Who would have thought it would be so easy to see that, having lived through her country’s autogenocide from its very start to its agonising finish, the grandmother of Petya and Katya has remained, in some profound sense, intact.
Marina Gustavovna sits at the kitchen table, as straight as a little pine tree, methodically cutting out the rotten bits from a pile of small, misshapen apples. The rotten bits by far exceed the good, edible parts, but she is determined to salvage whatever she can. What is that expression ‘one bad apple will spoil the whole bunch’? It was obviously born in a culture with an unlimited supply of apples. I recognise the salvaging instinct. I have seen it in all the women in my family who came before my sister and me – before the generation that stopped taking every sliver of material reality to its absolute utility limit. Things are not immortal, of course, but you never give up on them for, in the right hands, they can have multiple lives and afterlives – a piece of cotton is made into a sheet, then refashioned into a curtain, then turned into some fabric nappies and finally becomes a dishwashing cloth. Satirist Mikhail Zadornov writes that only in this country were carpets darned, torn shoelaces tied up in a special way and laced back into shoes, laddered stockings used for everything from making tea bags to storing onions (onion can breathe in stockings – a crucial point), sealing holes in window frames and straining cherry conserve.
Billie and I first sat in this kitchen with Marina Gustavovna a decade ago when we sought refuge in her apartment after a close encounter with a large rat in a flat just around the corner, the flat where Katya was then living with her two young daughters. For a woman long in pursuit of the meaning of courage, it did not take much to turn me into a certifiable coward. And so as certifiable cowards do, I woke Katya, who had barely had time to close her eyes since the night before, and made her give extended chase to the rat with a long-handled kitchen broom. Standing on top of a table, refusing to come down, I watched the rat, which was completely unperturbed, and noted the precise contours of Katya’s rib cage illuminated by the thin, white cotton of her nightie (a mother of two, she weighed less than a prepubescent girl). The next morning, Katya wisely packed me and Billie off to the family apartment and Marina Gustavovna. Rats abandoning the sinking ship? Well, yes, you might say that.
And now, ten years later, Marina Gustavovna’s fingers slide across the photo frames in search of what her eyes can no longer tell her – which one of her family is looking back at her now from this or that picture. ‘Come on, Billie, have a guess how many grandchildren and great-grandchildren I have. Come on, I am waiting.’ Marina Gustavovna’s voice doesn’t do the nonagenarian squeak-squeak. It has no bald patches, is full-blooded even at its quietest. Though its pitch does rise noticeably when I, not having paid sufficient attention to an initial stern ‘no’, continue to insist on helping clear the table after a cup of tea. ‘No, I am fine, thank you.’ I forget that Marina Gustavovna does not suffer fools gladly, particularly polite ones. I forget who I am talking to.
Ten years since our last meeting, Marina Gustavovna is increasingly betrayed by her body, which collapses on her, sometimes when she is alone and, what’s worse, in all kinds of public places. But her physical frailty does not mean that she no longer is able to tend the precious intellectual legacy of her father, Gustav Gustavovich Shpet, one of the most significant Russian philosophers of the early twentieth century. She pops up in a documentary film about Gustav Gustavovich, in newspaper articles, in the footnotes to prefaces and afterwords framing various editions of his once largely forgotten body of work. She was in Bordeaux in 2008 for the international conference that commemorated him as one of the most seminal figures of Russian intellectual life in the decades preceding and following the 1917 Revolution. And for many years now, Marina Gustavovna has been making her way to the Siberian town of Tomsk, where her father was exiled, for the annual readings dedicated to his memory.