Now Faina was gone, Kiev still had my grandfather’s herring (the taste of which I crave to this day), my grandfather’s typewriter (the only one in our family at the time) and, of course, my grandfather himself. All of my poems of any note were typed up on Iosif ‘s typewriter, and the very act of typing them made me feel less like a precocious Jewish girl and more like a writer. Being turned into identically sized, tightly set black letters on special extra-thin pieces of typing paper did wonders for the poems too: they got better, which is to say that in their printed form they instantly seemed to me less indulgent and try-hard. My grandfather used the typewriter for no less a creative task, even though he would not have seen it in that light. With considerable skill, he composed petitions to authorities on behalf of people who came to him: bare acquaintances or old comrades he had known since his days in the partisans, they all sought his help. My mum remembers him ‘endlessly’ typing those letters in the evenings.
The letters set out the circumstances of the arrests and various kinds of harassment endured by these people’s relatives. They asked for cases to be reconsidered and for the innocence of their loved ones to be reaffirmed. My grandfather was the master of a clear, clean and competent appeal to the authorities – a genre of its own in a country where citizens were routinely arrested on entirely fabricated or trumped-up charges. The frequently phantasmagoric nature of accusations meant that, despite their ordeal, shocked and terrified families could still harbour hope that a mistake had been made in their particular cases. A woman from the same Ukrainian shtetl as my grandfather’s family was arrested as part of the so-called Doctors’ Plot, perhaps Stalin’s last grand witch-hunt, in which Jewish doctors were accused of the conspiracy to poison the top political and military leadership and wreak medical sabotage on the broader community. Before the 1917 Revolution the tsarist pogromzhiki liked to accuse Jews of drinking the blood of Russian infants; with just another turn of the wheel, the vampires now became Jewish medicos. In the case of the accused woman, her brother stayed with my grandparents while my grandfather – the same man who would not tolerate anti-Soviet talk in his household – wrote letter after letter protesting the woman’s innocence on behalf of her family.
This was my mum’s father in a nutshell – prosecuting people by day in his professional job (embezzlers, not anyone involved in real or fictional political acts), and writing letters by night, imploring authorities for leniency on behalf of the wrongly accused. The late Faina Ranevskaya, an actress who was celebrated for her wit, famously quipped that in the Soviet Union the following three qualities could never coexist in the same person – intelligence, honesty and allegiance to the Communist Party. ‘If a person is intelligent and honest, he is not a member of the Party. If he is intelligent and a Party member, then he is dishonest. If he is honest and a Party member, then he is a fool.’ My grandfather was a true believer and also a deeply decent man, so I guess that would make him a fool. (In Australia, aged in his eighties, he read through masses of the secret documents and historical archives that came to light after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and reconsidered his political commitments once and for all.) ‘Your grandfather adopted a totally inexplicable position,’ Mum tells me as she remembers the convergence of his faith in the Party and his letter-writing. ‘I guess it was impossible to remain whole in that world.’
Whenever I think of Kiev, the audio of my memories always includes typewriter sounds – the backspace key repeatedly pressed hard, or the little bell at the line break punctuating the unmistakable pleasure of getting physical with words. I typed and typed in Kiev, and when I did not type, I walked. You never ran out of places to go to because Kiev was a bona fide metropolis. The place had everything – venerable history, magnificent architecture, the wide, full-bodied River Dnepr, not to mention cheese and coffee in the shops. (Capital cities were always better stocked than the rest of the country.) But I have rushed over the history for the coveted cheese and coffee. Kiev was once the centre of Kievan Rus, a medieval state that was the forerunner of the Russian Empire and the portal through which Christianity entered the region. And that was another thing that made Kiev special – the sheer number of cathedrals and churches that had somehow survived the Soviet war on religion. Even if they had been violently re-purposed, many of them were still part of the city skyline. They were a feast to the eyes of a child raised on a visual diet of hammer-and-sickle monuments (even a ‘godless Jew’ like me).
And the other thing about Kiev was that people loved their city, just as the Leningradtzi loved St Petersburg. The writer Mikhail Bulgakov, son of a theologian, grandson of two priests, was born here and never fell out of love with his city. Another Kiev-born writer Victor Nekrasov ended up in the authorities’ bad books precisely because of his love of his hometown and his sense of urgent, personal connection to his city’s recent history and urban fabric. Nekrasov wrote most poignantly about Kiev already after being forced into exile in 1974. He was expelled for exactly the same reason that so many other writers were – for spitting in the literary well from which a vast body of the Soviet reading public was drinking. I think of Bulgakov and Nekrasov often during my visit to Kiev with Billie. They feel real and close to me, my invisible companions, maybe because there is no more of our family left in the city – only my grandmother Faina’s grave.
I recognise Ira straight away, standing on the platform in a long coat next to her forty-something son (there primarily for heavy lifting). I am tempted to say that she has not changed in the twenty years since I last saw her, though I know the utter ridiculousness of such a claim. In this part of the world twenty years is enough to age anyone, but the last two decades have been like an incessant dose of heavy radiation. The story of those decades reads like a grand fable, a succession of cycles that seems to have an unstoppable, timeless logic: an Empire collapses, a New State emerges, Great Hope and Dreams of Democracy are followed by Disenchantment, Poverty and Lawlessness, then, at the start of a new cycle comes the Orange Revolution, bringing more Hope, more Dreams of Democracy and then more Disenchantment, Poverty and Lawlessness. Just as in Russia, there is a gaping wound between Ukraine’s haves and have-nots. And Ira (together with her son, who these days lives with her and spends a great deal of his time looking for work) is a serious have-not, objectively speaking. Yet you would not in your wildest dreams describe her as embattled, let alone defeated.
Even through the train window, Ira exudes strength and light-heartedness. People with hard lives, even the ones who have neither time nor inclination to feel sorry for themselves, often look like they are labouring under the weight of a massive burden. Not Ira. She is, as I said, the same woman I saw when we came to Kiev in 1989 to say our goodbyes – just aged in Photoshop. And she speaks like the same Ira too (the woman I remember and the one in my mother’s stories), in the same young voice, in the same direct, unweary, unhesitating way. Perhaps that instant familiarity I feel on the platform, familiarity which only grows during our time in Kiev, is partly to do with the fact that Ira speaks and acts just like Mum. If we had stayed and copped it, like Ira did, this is what my mum would have been like, I suddenly realise.