My grandfather’s inexplicable fortune continued in Chkalov. Perhaps this is the kind of stuff that only happens in war. At the moment he disembarked, Iosif ‘s mother was heading home from the market where she had exchanged tobacco and vodka for some bread and lard to eat. Iosif wrote in his memoirs:
Only 20 to 30 metres from the house, I saw my mother who turned around and ran into the house – ‘Fanya, I have a son, you have a husband, your kids have a father.’ No words can describe what happened when we all reunited, how many tears were shed. Even now, when I am writing these words, and more than fifty years have passed since then, I am crying.
Needless to say, Chkalov’s former prima ballerina, Galina Valeryanovna, was vindicated, big-time.
Stories of the war haunted me all through my childhood, in particular the story of Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, who quit her Moscow high school to join the partisans as soon as the war started. Tortured by the Nazis, Zoya did not give up the names of her comrades. Taken to the gallows for a public execution, she shouted (in one version at least): ‘You’ll hang me now, but I am not alone. There are millions of us, and you can’t hang us all.’ Like the generation before us, we learned about Zoya’s sacrifice at school. The first woman during the war to be awarded Hero of the Soviet Union (the highest honour in the land), she was a high-ranking martyr within the pantheon of war heroes and the one who somehow had a way of really getting to me.
In my mind Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya served as a trigger for a seemingly inescapable question: What would I do? Sometimes this question was heavy and demanding, like a toddler in my arms who would not be put down. Sometimes it was as annoying as a buzzing mosquito circling around my head for hours. In any event, I lay awake at night wondering what I would do (almost inevitably the question morphed into What will I do?, so certain was my belief that sooner or later the Cold War would produce another catastrophic conflict). I could not help but suspect the worst about myself – unable to withstand pain, I would give up the names of my comrades. I was ashamed of my hypothetical betrayal, of the paralysis and all-consuming fear I felt at the thought of torture and death. It never struck me as ludicrous to measure myself against Zoya. This was what Zoya was there for, so we could use her as a human yardstick of sacrifices we had yet to make. Our little lives against her great death. I did not spot the substitution nor did I feel the need to scream out, in some kind of moral self-defence, ‘Look around. The war is over. The Germans have long since gone home!’ Since 1991 Kosmodemyanskaya’s story has been challenged, not just the super-heroic part, but even her identity and the reason why she was caught by the Germans in the first place. (The story is that she set fire to a house in an occupied village with no strategic significance to the enemy.) So much about the war, the way it was blithely sold to us, turned out to be questionable at best.
Perhaps I was particularly impressionable as a child. Perhaps most kids were laughing on the inside as they took part in all of the rituals of veneration that the cult of Kosmodemyanskaya and other Soviet hero–martyrs demanded. Perhaps the teachers were laughing too, behind our stiff, uniform-clad backs. All I know is that I was not laughing. For all my own obsession with the subject, it never occurred to me to bombard the older women in my family with questions about their wartime experiences. I knew much more about Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya (true or false) than about my own grandmother. In my family my grandfather was a war hero because he fought; all the rest were simply survivors. I was proud of my grandfather’s chestful of medals, of the bravery and leadership he demonstrated as a partisan, of the way he sabotaged the enemy and cheated death almost daily. The way Soviet society publicly remembered the war diminished the value of private memories, especially those of women who did not do anything sufficiently heroic or sacrificial (keeping your children alive did not count). When a great deal of archival and historical information that put a thousand nails in the coffin of Soviet war mythology was finally unleashed during my late teens, I felt the need to distance myself from the topic altogether, as if the child I once was, who stayed awake wondering what she would do in the hands of the Nazis, felt cheated and betrayed.
Historian S. Aleksievich writes that women remember the war differently from men:
The women’s war has its own colours and smells, its own lighting and its own sentient spaces. Its own words. In this war there are no heroes and extraordinary feats, there are only people busy with their inhuman human endeavours. And in this war they [the people] are not the only ones suffering, but also the earth and the birds and the trees. Everyone who lives alongside us on this earth. They are suffering wordlessly, which is even scarier.
In interviewing survivors of the Leningrad siege for their Book of the Blockade, Granin and Adamovich also came to regard women’s memory as distinctive – it was concerned with details and nuances ‘more colourful and robust’ than that of the men they interviewed.
I was Billie’s age when Faina passed away, and I never really spoke to her about the war. It was not just that I had had my fill of heroic stories: I was too scared of causing my grandmother pain with my questions. I think I understood even then that the actual war – as opposed to the war of heroic mythology – continued to burn inside the people who went through it. It was too immense, too painful and too raw to be a subject of desultory conversation. And even as a grown woman more than capable of initiating difficult conversations, I thought for a long time that there was something cold and dishonouring about orchestrating a family history moment, at least when it came to war experiences, and so I waited for the family stories to come out on their own accord without being forced or solicited by me. God knows, it took me this long to speak to my own mother about it, not in passing, but at length, chasing every detail, slowing the story down, tracking backwards to make sense of sequences of events that seemed miraculous or incongruous or both.
The women in my family had a different war to the one I grew up imagining. I want Billie to know their war, her great-grandmother’s and grandmother’s war, and I am finally ready to ask a million questions. Of course I know now that, underneath it all, beyond my own difficult relationship with the subject of the war and the fear of somehow not doing the right thing by the experiences of those who survived it, I was also scared to death of immersing myself in that world of ‘inhuman human endeavours’. I was right to be scared. I carry much more pain inside myself now than I did before I started asking questions. I cry a lot, and I hug my children with rib-crunching bear hugs. Once again, the war haunts me, whether it is the war my own family lived through in Ukraine, Uzbekistan and the Ural region, or the deprivations of the blokadniki of Leningrad. I lie awake at night imagining, not SS troopers, but Faina’s story: a baby inside me and another one in my arms. Bombs explode, the last bit of bread is eaten and all our documents are stolen, while around us women just like me clutch their children, and everyone who lives alongside us on this earth is suffering, side by side.
12
KIEV
IN 1986 MY BELOVED grandmother Faina died. It was just a month after the catastrophic explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in northern Ukraine, and when my parents travelled to Kiev for the funeral, the grief and emotional displacement they felt was multiplied by another shock. The train station looked like it had during the Great Patriotic War, with countless children, surrounded by bags, being sent away by their parents. (A year later on a walking holiday in a Baltic forest we saw mushrooms three or four times their normal size, apparently nurtured by radioactive rain, but that’s a whole other story.)