It comes up again in Kiev, a week or so after our visit to Katya. How could it not when we stay with Ira, the best friend of my mum’s youth, the one who is in spirit so breathtakingly close to what I have always considered to be my mother’s unique blend of dignity and irreverence, humility and sharpness. Ira, who reminds me so much of Mum in the calm self-possession that infuses her total disregard for ceremony and convention. It is on noticing how quickly Billie tires out and how easily she gives in to her discomforts, that Ira – the warm, kind, ironic, tough Ira who sees everything – tells us the story of my mother and her high-heeled shoes.
‘Your mum and I, we often did not sleep at night, we went for long walks all the time, and she would always have her high heels on. We would walk day and night. Once we decided at nine in the evening to go from a collective farm where we were sent, through the forest, to Kiev. We reached Kiev at nine in the morning. We threw out our shoes along the way, they were useless, and this is how we walked through the forest at night. Cars would stop and offer us a lift. We were very young, but we were very proud and we wanted to do it all by ourselves. After this walk, we could not take a step on the ground for three days without our feet hurting.’
In those days, in summer, city professionals were routinely sent to the collective farms to assist the nationwide harvest effort; Mum and Ira, who worked at the same institute in Kiev, were already good friends when the Long Night of the Stilettos took place. So the set-up for Ira’s story is as ordinary as they come, but the story itself I find elating. My mother – strong, proud, light-footed, determined, with an unstoppable supply of laughter, and, what is the word I am looking for… yes, free.
‘We used to like putting an apple in our pockets and going for long walks; once we walked to the construction site of a hydro-electric station, fifteen or twenty kilometres away. Got there easy and made friends there and then. We could easily walk for an hour and a half for the sake of getting a small cup of coffee. At the time, there was only one place in Kiev, on Khrezhatik, where you could get a cup of coffee like that. Usually, black international students would be there, and us, that’s all.’
I do not need to strain my imagination to see my mum with a Newton’s apple in her pocket, or the way she and Ira did not pussyfoot around anything, the way they enjoyed nothing more than not taking things easy. They have not changed really, Mum and Ira, not in any essential way. Mum’s legs might hurt too much to withstand a high-heeled hike in the dark, but both she and Ira still find much irony in how easily and willingly people turn themselves into fragile, self-limiting organisms. Both of them seem to lack almost entirely the deep attachment to comforts that some people are born with and many cultivate with age, and in that way you can say they are stoic, only their stoicism has no hint of martyrdom or self-elevation. It is a simple, laughing stoicism of two people who never came to take themselves too seriously.
In Margaret Atwood’s Significant Moments in the Life of Mother, the daughter speaks of her own perception of her mother’s youth:
I used to think that my mother, in her earlier days, led a life of sustained hilarity and hair-raising adventure… Horses ran away with her, men offered to, she was continually falling out of trees or off the ridgepoles of barns, or nearly being swept out to sea in rip-tides…
The mother was always just a broken zipper away from acute public embarrassment. And even though the daughter later came to understand that the mother had only told stories of things gone blissfully awry, of near-death experiences that with time had acquired a euphoric ring to them, thus leaving out ‘the long stretches of uneventful time’, this storytelling, or rather what it conveyed about the narrator, became central to the daughter’s understanding of who her mother was. ‘Having fun has always been high on my mother’s agenda,’ says the daughter, as much fun as one can handle. And having fun was integral to my own perception of my mother. Could that be why, in real-life stories of women’s grace under fire, stories which have obsessed me from a young age, I have always been drawn most powerfully to women who laughed, danced and wore mascara through some of the bleakest moments of the twentieth century? I think them inherently heroic: the ones in London running to dance halls during breaks in the Blitz; the ones in besieged Sarajevo spending their last money on lipstick; my dear friend Sabina Wolanski, the only one from her family to survive the Holocaust, who went dancing every night after the end of the war.
The mother in Margaret Atwood’s story tells countless ‘having fun’ stories, but as her daughter knows:
What she means by this phrase cannot be understood without making an adjustment, an allowance for the great gulf across which this phrase must travel before it reaches us. It comes from another world, which, like the stars that originally sent out the light we see hesitating in the sky above us these nights, may be or is already gone.
To Billie, the fun my mother had in such abundance as a young woman does come from another world. If my daughter ever tries to see her grandmother as someone who really knew how to be young, she inevitably will have to walk across this great gulf not just of time but also of culture, history and geography. But for me no adjustments are necessary. When Ira speaks, I do not need to go far. I am there. Or, rather, I wish I were there. And I wish I could take Billie there with me.
Dear Diary,
Because Mum wanted me to have a good last time in Moscow so we met up with the sister and mother of close family friends in Australia, who gave us a tour of Moscow. Probably the thing that had the most impression on me was statues called ‘Children, the Victims of Adult Vices’. It had two golden children who were blindfolded (to the future) and around them were thirteen statues representing thirteen horrible aspects of adults. Drug use, prostitution, theft, alcoholism, idiocy, being two-faced, making fun of people, not caring about the past, child labour, poverty, atom war and the most important one in the middle – indifference.
Lest you be swept up in the pathos of Billie’s writing, I must tell you that she writes ‘empression’ and ‘horrable’, among other things. This is because she is in a hurry to capture the whole vortex of emotions and impressions, you may say. No, this is because she cannot spell for nuts. In Russia, bad spelling is a notorious sign of poor education or, at least, of a damning lack of ability; never the fashionable attribute of a big-picture creative person. I am an avid admirer of Billie’s prose, but I cringe on seeing words slighted and unceremoniously knocked about, exchanged for their phonetic approximations and for words that look like their body-doubles but bear only the vaguest family relationship. Sometimes I want to throw one massive ‘J’accuse’ in the face of the education system that has instituted the complete abandonment of language and grammar as one of its foundational doctrines – a system that I, for one, have resisted with annoyingly limited success in my attempts to disabuse my daughter of her belief that spelling is for losers. Could this carelessness with the mechanics and maintenance of one’s language be a form of a victor’s syndrome? With English the planet’s de facto meta-language (at least for now), you might say its native speakers are born with a linguistic silver spoon in their mouths. There is such a thing as linguistic privilege. I know, I have tried to sneak in and claim it too.