Billie, this is my dear friend Marina I have told you so much about. Marina, this is my daughter, Billie. Here we are. Within the same four walls for the first time ever. Every meeting like that, across even one generation, feels like the undoing of a curse. It should be the most basic thing in the world for your friends to know your kids and for your friends’ kids to take you and your presence for granted, to recognise your voice on the phone even before you finish saying hello: ‘Mum is not home, Auntie Maria. Have to go. Bye.’ But this is precisely the knot that emigration unties, this kind of assumed inter-generational mingling, assured in perpetuity for those who never leave the place they grew up in. Or at least, this is the knot that emigration used to untie. It does not have to be like that anymore, now that the era of the migrant ship is over, and walls between East and West, North and South have crumbled. Today’s migrants know that coming back for a visit (even for good, perhaps) is just a question of money and dealing with rampant, greedy, sadistic bureaucracy. But back in 1989, when we left, things were different. My mum thought she would never see anyone again – not her friends, not her sister and not her father. (She turned out to be wrong about the last two.) When she was finally inside the train with many of her friends on the platform weeping and waving, well of course the train was then delayed for fifteen minutes, suspending them all at this point of the irreversible tear. It was, Mum says, probably the deepest and the sharpest grief of her life. So understand that in 1989 our goodbyes were not provisional. To have this sense of permanent rupture undone, for my daughter to be locked in a hug with Marina, for me to give Marina and Misha’s nine-year-old son a respectful peck on the cheek (real boys don’t hug) – this is the revenge of the emigrant, the ‘Flight of the Bumblebee’, and the triumph of human will, all at once.
Dear Diary,
My imaginary Marina was tall, long-legged, had long wavy brown hair and, unfortunately, was dressed in a very doll-like patriotic Russian costume. The real Marina was small, with straight black hair and most definitely was not wearing the patriotic Russian outfit!!! The one thing my two Marinas had in common was warmth.
Misha Junior had met me five years ago when I was last in St Petersburg, but I am sure he remembered little if anything of that visit. So I could not but wonder how imaginary Maria and Billie were meant to look and sound like in his mind, in what way we were meant to wear our made-in-Australia tags. What, by the way, would a patriotic Australian costume look like – and would it involve a pair of thongs? The ‘imaginary Marina’ as an ethnic Barbie doll, now this was funny. I had no idea that all this time in her mind Billie was dressing my childhood friends in folk costumes embroidered with symbols of nationhood, as if they came from some kind of 1980s Soviet Embassy reception. But Billie was right about one thing: with people like Marina it feels like someone is gently blowing warm air onto your frostbite. It is a feeling of gradual thawing out. The warm meal; the clean, crisp sheets; the warm water in the shower saved just for us. Drop by drop, the Russian airport as the state of being is expunged. This is what Marina does.
Marina is a broadcaster, a born one at that. Proud woman of the radio waves, heard regularly on Eldorado station, St Petersburg’s home of retro radio, she is capable of communicating everything from gravity to bemusement by an imperceptible change in phrasing or register. My fellow Scorpio Marina, born in a country where women were supposed to be people, citizens, mothers, workers first and only then women; yet, just like my own mother, Marina is something I have never learnt to be: a woman first, and all else second.
For many decades, the official Soviet rhetoric of equality and emancipation was maintained against a backdrop of actual startling inequality coupled with an unquestioning expectation of women’s readiness for self-sacrifice. Yes, there were countless women engineers and women doctors in the Soviet Union at a time when their Western stepsisters were left to contend with the ‘teacher, nurse or secretary’ trifecta. During World War II Soviet women did not just bandage the wounded or manufacture ammunitions, they led tank divisions and operated machine guns. And after the war it was Valentina Tereshkova, with her perfectly proletarian roots (her father was first a tractor driver and then a slain war hero), who became the first woman in space in 1963. The ‘glass ceiling’ may have been well and truly broken for Soviet women, but the shards of the shattered glass lodged themselves in every aspect of women’s everyday existence.
Though the Constitution guaranteed Soviet women equal rights, the actual differences in their estates was revealed in a simple ‘chastushka’, a folk limerick which could be loosely translated like this: ‘I am a horse, I am a whale, I am a female and a male.’ Soviet women were repeatedly told how far they had come compared to their bourgeois counterparts – after all, the existence of the vast majority of tragically domesticated Western women was summed up by the Three K’s in the atavistic German slogan popular under Hitler: Kinder, Küche, Kirche (Children, Kitchen, Church). The irony, of course, was that neither Kinder nor Küche had disappeared from the equation for ‘liberated’ Soviet women, while the Party was to prove far more demanding and omnipresent than the Kirche. Women were essentially the slaves of the slaves, with little leisure to contemplate the difficulties of their two-tier subjugation. It was not a question of wanting it all, but rather of doing it all – work, children, housework, community work and sex (try doing it in a room you share with your kids and your parents). Soviet women led the world in abortion statistics because of the lack of contraceptives. Forget about time to spend on self-development! They pinned back their two-sizes-too-big tops, stuffed cotton wool in their two-sizes-too-large shoes and, after long hours at work and in queues, they constructed elaborate networks of contacts and strategic alliances so as to get their hands on a mascara or a creamy beige face powder. (They were women, after all.)