Billie, I have come to realise in the last few years, is defined by her relationship with language, even more so than by her temperament, her paper-thin skin or the fact of being raised without a father. She may not be able to control the emotions constantly accelerating within her, but she sure can channel them into words. The English language is Billie’s true home. She floats in it as in a warm bath of sea salts, resting, ridding herself of aches and pains, almost visibly regrouping.
Billie loves adverbs more than adjectives, because they marry action with emotional intensity. She has her favourites too – enthusiastically, dramatically, overwhelmingly and massively. She stuffs even the most mundane, fleeting conversations with metaphors – pure, mixed, triple-deckers. She loves words that hit you over the head – misery and despair have been her staples ever since she was eight. In no small measure because Billie views language as the natural domain of meritocracy, rather than of an autocratic pecking order, she is often a nuisance at school. She speaks to ‘authority’ figures in her abundant, uncensored and overflowing English. She talks back and she talks forward, and only rarely does she show any evidence of self-restraint or pragmatic compliance. A primary school teacher with whom Billie developed a fully reciprocated animosity said to me more than once that his class functioned much better on those days when my daughter was away. Make of that what you will. Billie’s relationship with words is emblematic of her relationship with the world. There is nothing half-hearted about her. To my absolute delight, she cries a lot over books and movies. Neither overly rational nor stingy with her emotions, she refuses to draw a sharp distinction between the real and the imaginary. Instead of saying, ‘This is not real, so why should I bother?’ Billie says, ‘How come this feels so real? How come this hurts so much?’ ‘These damn writers,’ she mutters, weeping over the last chapter of yet another book, ‘they just get to you. Why do they torture us, Mum?’ But it is singing, not reading, that, for years, has been Billie’s consuming passion. And she is so good that of late I have started claiming retrospectively some uncanny powers of foresight. Calling my daughter Billie after Billie Holiday, I insist, has been a self-fulfilling prophecy. I knew, I say, I always knew that my little daughter would sing one day. (You understand, of course, that just as with the lisp, I never actually had a clue.) When Billie sings, she closes her eyes, shutting off any possible distractions. Her way of devoting herself fully to the song is what people in ‘the industry’ call a ‘committed performance’. I would call it a form of profound humility, an act of conscious surrender to the largeness of music.
When I was a teenager, a well-meaning friend of my parents described me as a natural calamity. It must run in the family. In both my case and Billie’s, we did not gradually and gently shed our prepubescent skins still retaining some of that baby softness; we ripped them off ourselves. Or maybe they were ripped off us – by emigration in my case (I was fifteen when my family left the former Soviet Union); in Billie’s by her mother’s failed attempts to make a nuclear family. Because she has never met her biological father, she has already learned the rudiments of emotional self-defence – bravado, deflection, improvisation, acute storytelling. I have heard her matter-of-factly describe the father of her little brother, Miguel, as my second ex-stepfather, a title which sums up both the rather high turnover of male figures in her life and Billie’s refusal to keep quiet and ashamed about her family’s unorthodox ways. Sometimes I think Billie has been an adolescent all her childhood days. Because of her instinctive early recognition of the power of language, her innate stubbornness and her preoccupation with justice as she sees it, she knew and practised defiance well before her peer group was scheduled to encounter it on the ‘rocky road to adulthood’.
We write, chewing on boiled eggs and biscuits, until the train attendant comes to check our papers. We are the holders of Australian passports; in the leaking, smelly, creaking carriage she presides over, as exotic as they come. Our attendant does not have a throng of golden teeth like the woman who checked our tickets and documents on the last train we took, and whose accidental smile made Billie jump with amazement. This one wears no jewellery, outside or inside her mouth. She is what they call unassuming – a middle-aged Ukrainian woman from a small town, who knocks on doors softly, speaks to passengers quietly and, all in all, runs her section of the train as a provincial bed and breakfast, not a battle-ready nuclear submarine.
The attendant keeps looking through our passports, searching for something. At first I imagine that she is simply lost in the unfamiliar travel documents, distracted by the frivolous kangaroo on the cover.
‘Can’t find your Belarusian visas,’ she finally says.
‘But we are not going to Belarus, God forbid. This train is going to Ukraine,’ I say, by now completely confused.
‘No, girls, on the way to Ukraine this train is passing through Belarusian territory, and all foreign citizens need to have Belarusian transit visas. I can go and ask my boss but chances are you will be taken off the train. Those Belarusian border-control guys are notorious and you cannot argue with them and you cannot even try to give them money or things. Maybe you should try to get off while we are still in Russia.’
She leaves to speak with her boss. ‘It should be OK,’ I say to Billie, who is struggling to hold back her tears. ‘We had no idea,’ I add emphatically. ‘There is no information about this train going through Belarus anywhere, how were we supposed to know? No one told us when we bought the tickets. There is nothing on the web. Nothing on the ticket. Our St Petersburg friends did not have a clue. We will be fine. There was no way we could have known. We are not breaking any law.’ For a brief moment Billie looks relieved. ‘Exactly,’ she proclaims, ‘it is not our fault. No one has told us anything. How were we supposed to know?’ Then the train attendant comes back.
‘The boss said that it is not looking good. They will ask for visas. These guys are like the Fascists.’ The weight of our train attendant’s concern pushes her down onto Billie’s already made-up bed. She knows that she should not be sitting around talking. She has teas to make for the quiet ones like us getting ready to be rocked to sleep and for the unruly ones who will use glasses of tea to pace their vodka shots. But she is visibly worried. ‘There was an eighty-six-year-old man on this train not so long ago and they showed him no mercy.’
She comes in the middle of the night to give us one more chance to get off the train before we enter Belarus and seal our fate. We politely refuse. I have injured my back a week or so before, and I find distinctly unappealing the prospect of being stranded in some godforsaken Russian town in the middle of the night with our suitcase, sitting at some freezing railway station for hours and then having to zigzag across the country, to say nothing of spending whatever little money we have left on brand-new train tickets – all of this only to avoid going through Belarus. Why the hell should we? We are not guilty of anything. We are not scared. ‘We’ll take our chances,’ I tell our attendant. ‘We’ll stay on the train.’ All I want is to go back to sleep and not to have to think about visas and what the big, bad Belarusian border-control guys may or may not do to us tomorrow. All I want is just some more of my train-sleep brew.
Dear Diary,
When the caring and kind train attendant warned us about the Belarusian Border Control, she said, ‘They were like the Nazis.’ Fascists, she called them. Well, can I add a few words to that analogy – words like heartless and inhumane. The guy, Ivan Petrovich Sidorov, who kicked us off the train had an immense case of Inhumanity.