‘Mum, if I get lost, I’ll never find my way out. I don’t know where we live. I don’t know who to ask for help, or even what to ask them. I don’t know how this Metro works. My mobile is not working. I cannot speak or read Russian. I want to go home. You are driving me insane. I want to see Nanna. I want to see my friends. You are making me crazy.’
She strides out ahead of me, as if wanting to get lost in the crowd of commuters, as if daring me to let her go. I run after her, totally dispensing with my parental doctrine of non-appeasement, begging for some temporary peace, at least while we are Metro-bound. This is not one of the worst fights we have ever had, but it is a real blow to my fantasies of a superhuman bond forged between us on this trip, of shared revelations, synchronised cathartic tears and previously unheard-of levels of mutual acceptance. Of course, our row feels that much more debilitating because we are away from home, away from separate rooms we can storm into, away from spontaneously erupting ceasefires and all those invisible, unsung technologies of defusion that fill any home space inhabited for long enough.
We have no choice but to stick together for the rest of the day, wisely keeping any possible eye contact or verbal exchanges to the bare minimum.
When we fight, Billie and I are like two cocks, throwing all we have at each other. We may start out slowly, quietly, whispering and whizzing, but invariably we end up sacrificing discretion and hurling words at each other in measurable decibels. After our fights, especially the recent ones marked by new levels of intensity, I often think (somewhat despairingly) of anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s famous description of a Balinese cockfight: ‘Every people, the proverb has it, loves its own form of violence… its look, its uses, its force, its fascination.’ This strikes me as very accurate, this idea of controlled eruptions of violence as an opportunity to reflect hard on the stakes and undercurrents involved in sustaining any intimate or social relationship. It’s not as though Billie and I stage our fights – you need only see us in action to dispense with any such notion – but I do think our fights allow us to witness something fundamental and true about our relationship as mother and daughter. Because our tempers are evenly matched and Billie has never been really scared of me, neither threats nor reasoning usually works for us. We do not necessarily fight dirty, but it is rare for us to arrive at a clean resolution. Rather we work through escalation to explosion and then, depending on the scale of the damage done, to silence, remorse or, just occasionally, liberating laughter. Our fights lay bare not the social conventions that encourage our co-dependency and make us behave in a particular way towards each other, but the real, clumpy, sticky glue that holds us together.
Why do we go to the Metro (other than because the traffic at street level is ten times worse and, quite frankly, other options are too expensive)? Do we go to learn what humanity looks like in bulk, bottled up and in a desperate rush somewhere? Back in Melbourne after our trip, I read Billie’s neat summation of our time in Moscow leading up to the fight:
I have a question, please raise your hand if you enjoy being dragged after your mum through houses of people who you never knew existed, pushed into trains with impossible volumes of people and kicked out of them, walking in endless circles trying to find a florist and many other excruciating activities whilst desperate to eat and rest. If you answered yes, you would have thoroughly enjoyed my life in Moscow. But I, unfortunately, am a completely different person and would have rather cleaned cow droppings for a year than have endured what happened.
Could I imagine when I planned this trip that Billie and I would come undone so quickly, that a few too many hours in the Moscow Metro would rattle her to the extent that she would be dreaming of cow droppings? And if I had any intimation of the speed with which our solidarity would disintegrate, what exactly would I have done differently? For me, Billie was always the non-optional part of this trip. If I longed to make clashing or at least disparate parts of my life feel closely and meaningfully connected, then the work of connecting made little sense without her. I needed her to come with me, for better or for worse, not simply because I wanted her to know where her mother came from, but because I wanted her to feel, alongside me, the pull of our family history, to size up for herself the true measurements of our past, or perhaps of any past – its depth, its reach and its towering presence in the present.
6
GLUBINKA
TOWARDS THE END OF our time in Moscow, Billie and I take a train south-east to visit a young friend – another Katya. When Billie and I first met her in Melbourne four years ago, the eleven-year-old Katya was in town on some kind of exchange with a humanitarian flavour. She was taken in by an Australian family with several kids of their own. I knew the mother and, by all accounts, the family were genuinely nice and hospitable, and just as genuinely clueless about what it meant to host a person from a world that shared little beyond the basics with their own default one. It should be mentioned too that the girl came from a culture that did not exactly inspire confidence, having all but cornered the market (Nigerians, eat your heart out!) on bridal and internet scams. To the host family it had seemed self-evident just what they needed to do with this scrawny, shy Russian girl with little English, who came from a small town with an unpronounceable name and a population not significantly larger than that of Geelong. Feed her, buy her some clothes with a generous helping of glitter and show her the wonders of Western civilisation, starting with Chadstone Shopping Centre – a no-brainer really.
For her part, Katya was meant to be grateful, easygoing and visibly bursting with excitement. And it was very much in her nature to be just that – to show deep and instant recognition of any expression of genuine kindness from others – but Chadstone outings made her cry. Family barbecues and Monopoly face-offs made her cry too. The host family grew more and more uneasy about her stay, unsure why their good deed was unravelling in front of them. Whichever way you look at it, it was not their fault that they mistook Katya for someone she most certainly was not. How were they meant to know?
It was at this point that the mother asked me, as the only Russian speaker of her acquaintance, to talk to Katya so that she could explain her sadness in her native tongue. And this is how it happened. First we talked on the phone. Then we met. Then Katya moved in with me and Billie at my parents’ two-bedroom unit in suburban Murrumbeena, which was already stretched to the limit by our own temporary occupation. Billie and I were there because I was on my own and trying to write my first book. We needed all the help we could get. And so did Katya. On reflection, it may be that Katya was the closest I had ever come to love at first sight (not counting Billie and Miguel, of course). At eleven she was clear, poised and luminous – already fully formed as a person. She continuously emitted warmth, yet she needed warmth too, a lot of it, constantly circulating, flowing back and forth. And she had the most affecting smile, gentle and reserved, which she never deployed to get her own way or to cover up things. That was what struck me most, how she did not seem in the least bit interested in temporarily cuddling up to people coming into her orbit. She felt deeply and understood loyalty. And this is how she loved us, almost from the very beginning, even from the time before she came to live with us.
Young Katya was a competitive swimmer in a nation famous for its coaching philosophy built around an unquestioned belief in spilling the blood of the new blood. The minds and bodies of the next generation of athletes needed to be ripped apart and then pieced back together by the coaching staff, in accordance with strict specifications. Katya seemed lodged deeply inside that system, training every morning before school, yet she had neither the skin of an elephant nor the rigid, efficient self-centredness of many young athletes. However her coaches tried to mould her, there were huge chunks of her they did not get to. It was particularly clear when you looked in her eyes. It was not just me, my mum could see it too.