If this is my Double Life of Véronique moment, then make it times two because as much as being with Katya makes me ask what would have become of me if I had stayed in my old country, it makes me wonder even more acutely what Billie would have been like if she were born here. God knows, my loud-as-an-air-raid-siren Billie would have lost a few decibels. She would not have had her theatricality – all the dramatic excesses, the poses and the monologues. (’We are a bunch of outspoken, emotional people,’ she says of her friends.) She would have learned that emotions are essentially private matters, not events staged outwardly. She would have known things about things she did not care about because she would have been educated in the system that did not flirt with its students, that did not fear insisting and imposing on them. She would have lived with the heavy realities of economics and politics on her back, not separated from them by the wall of liquid crystals framing her television screen, by her mother’s alleged ability ‘to take care of things’, and by the limit of her imaginative engagement with the world of hard facts. She would not have considered the world her oyster (assuming, of course, she does now).
In Katya’s room, Katya and Billie hug, whisper and laugh. They speak English to each other – Katya has private English lessons on top of the school program and she loves the idea of finally practising her English with a native speaker who can talk all day and night. The love they felt for each other four years ago in Melbourne requires little nudging to re-emerge. ‘We must love each other or die,’ Auden wrote in September 1, 1939. His poem about adults as scared as children is following me around in Stary Oskol. I was Katya’s age when we left for good. Katya’s vulnerability, purity and strength remind me of what must have been at stake for me then, how high those stakes must have been. It is most likely, I admit, a massive case of identity confusion – at different moments, and sometimes all at the same time, I feel like Katya and like her surrogate mother and like the crystal ball into which she can never see clearly (but which carries within itself the knowledge that life cannot spare indefinitely people like her). In Katya’s presence I feel old for knowing what I know and young for feeling every emotion as a direct ray, the kind that does not slide off your skin but goes right through undeterred. This bout of identity confusion is only deepened by my immigrant story: as someone who left, I know both here and there; as someone who is no longer a child, I know both now and then. As I think of Katya’s future, fighting off a pretty standard list of apprehensions, I remind myself that I was never an adult in this country so I never got to lead a life of my own making here. I have no idea what I would have made of it.
Katya brings me back not only to myself as I was then but to Billie now. How big experiences are when you are twelve or fifteen, how deeply they enter us, how piercing the sense of loss – of home, of our idea of home, or of our innocent belief that we will never have to tear ourselves away from people and things we love. Before we all leave for the train station, Katya’s father polishes his shoes with great thoroughness. ‘Let’s sit for the road,’ he says, just like my father used to say every time we were about to go on our summer vacations. We all sit down in the hall. One frozen frame, one held breath before getting into the car together for the last time. May our journey be smooth and forgettable. May we come to our destination serene and refreshed. My stomach tightens. I see Billie’s face being gradually taken over by the pre-Katya greyness. I am too afraid to look at Katya.
Dear Diary,
When we had to board the train I tried to make a joke and we all laughed, but when the train started with a jerk, it jerked our hearts and that was it – the train moved. My heart tore in half.
Two decades before my twelve-year-old daughter writes these words in her diary, my best friend stood on a platform, just as Katya does now. My best friend, Sasha, who turned sixteen on the day of our emigration of all days, and who I still love twenty years later not with a gentle, nostalgic love but with a strong, painful, irritated love of the present moment. Sasha’s face was the only thing that felt real in this whole business of leaving for good. Her face, and the music of ‘The Farewell of Slavianka’, a pre-revolutionary march dedicated to the plight of Slavic women seeing their menfolk off to war and once regularly performed at the departure of posh ( firmenny) trains to Moscow. This time it is Katya, not Sasha, who stands outside the window of an overnight train to Moscow. And inside the little cabin, peering through the burgundy curtains (so unexpectedly fin-de-siècle), I hold hands, not with my older sister whose devastation I am too self-absorbed to notice, but with Billie, whose tears, as round and perfectly defined as soap bubbles, fall every few seconds on my hands and on the little table covered with a cloth that matches the improbable curtains.
Train departures are a particular kind of leave-taking, the most cinematic and certainly the most undisguised and unlubricated. The elaborate, anxiety-provoking rituals of air travel inject an anesthetic between those who leave and those who have come to see them off. The train goodbye is like a rough and violent cut without a sedative or even a gulp of whisky. You can hear and feel the tearing. And then there is always the spectre of other train journeys, of millions across Europe taken to concentration camps and Gulags in cattle trains.
It is Katya’s, not Sasha’s, eyes that I see from the train window now – so mature, so pure. She will be fine, of course. She is a powerhouse, this girl – beautiful, smart, determined and entirely humble. Her parents love and support her. Her school thinks her a hero as she keeps winning all kinds of regional competitions in Russian, English and God knows what else. She will be totally fine. It is not like we are abandoning her to a pack of wolves. I can tell this to myself all night long, but I know what I feel. Leaving Katya does not feel bitter-sweet or exquisitely sad, it feels like a non-elective cesarian. At first Katya is a full-sized figure, holding onto her mum, both of them crying and laughing at once at Billie’s brave but stupid joke. Then she is a pulsating rectangle of colour and light in the distance. Then she is a tiny pebble swallowed up by the railway tracks.
7
MOTHERS AND DAUGHTERS
NO MATTER WHAT, MY mother was always sacred to me… When I can hang on, this is where I leave it, but more often than not, I hammer the nail until the wall bleeds: …but I am not at all sacred for you. It is the voice of maternal desperation speaking, though have I not peaked a few years early? What room am I leaving for emotional bribery in (God forbid) any really serious teenage crisis – methamphetamines, pregnancies and membership in extremist political organisations? I grew up knowing implicitly (because this is how my parents and their friends were) that you should never try to wrestle recognition or respect out of anyone, let alone your own child, so to demand an acknowledgement of my maternal sanctity is a new low. But with Billie, I am already in the valley of lows, and we are just starting out – at least, this is what everyone keeps telling me, with the kindest intentions of course. I know, I know, but can’t you see, I am waiting for a miracle.