‘Your mother was really striking – those eyes of hers and those super-long lashes, a grey lock of hair and high heels, always stylishly dressed.’
‘Did many guys at your work like her?’
‘Just about every single one of them.’
I remember reading writer Zoe Heller’s description of her mother, Caroline Carter, who was beautiful – not unobtrusively pretty but ‘importantly beautiful’. ‘Reared on her example,’ Heller wrote, ‘I grew up thinking of beauty as something inextricably linked to the formidable – the first time I met a silly beautiful woman, I was startled.’ With a mother like mine, I saw beauty in a similar light. (I am sure it is obvious by now that I have never had an Oedipus complex, only an inferiority one!)
‘One time we went skiing,’ says Ira. ‘I knew what I was doing, but it was the first time for your mum. Her legs were sliding apart all the time, she was dog-tired, but she did not say a word. She tried not to show me that she was struggling. I saw, of course, what was going on, but I pretended that I could not see anything and said nothing. This is the kind of person your mother was.’ What kind of person is that then? Stoic, self-possessed obviously, not frightened by difficulties, the opposite of a wallflower no matter the high heels and those ‘super-long lashes’. She was, you can say, someone who liked a challenge – that quintessential English word that, like the word ‘privacy’ has no equivalent in Russian – a young woman with a great capacity for happiness and joy. One day, Ira tells me and Billie, they bought tickets to the movies and then discovered that they were really hungry. So Mum and Ira counted what little money they had between them – a handful of coins, enough for one side dish of plain macaroni. They got the macaroni and divided it between two plastic bags. They watched the movie, pecked on macaroni and felt totally blissed out.
‘Your mother,’ says Dad, ‘always had a unique combination of intelligence, beauty and a sense of humour. There was nothing ordinary about her. I could not believe those stories she told me in passing about what she did with Ira… I was so taken by them when I met her. I have never come across anyone like her… not before and not since.’
Until now, before this conversation with Ira in her kitchen, I had not really considered just how much my mother’s move to Kharkov must have hurt both Mum and Ira, how different their lives could have been if they had stayed in the same city as grown-up women with families. And here is another thing I have never considered: how difficult it must have been for Ira, becoming a single mother in a country where being alone – with a kid but without a man – always spelt trouble. Ira separated from her husband when their son was still little. She has not spoken to him again (she had her reasons), nor has she ever remarried. Financially, it must have been hell to survive on one income, but much more debilitating was the way that Soviet society treated single mothers then. Most people simply could not allow the possibility that a single mother could prefer to remain on her own. I have often wondered what it would have been like for me to have raised Billie on my own in Ukraine. Not long ago a former classmate of mine from Kharkov, whom I considered fairly emancipated, seemed devastated to discover that, like her, I was on my own with kids. ‘I am sorry to hear that your life too has not worked out,’ she wrote to me (and I thought it had worked out pretty well, so far at least!). In Australia, no one has pitied me for my ‘terrible misfortunes’ (not that I know of, or care, anyway), and I have not been forced to compromise either personally or professionally because of my ‘diminished’ status. ‘Optimism is simply a lack of information,’ Faina Ranevskaya once quipped. I think in Ira’s case her optimism was some kind of innate, almost biological resistance to the trappings of victimhood – a trait she shares with my mother and my auntie, and, I suspect, many other women of that ‘war’ generation.
Ira was a war child like my mum; her mother too was pregnant with her when the war began but, unlike my grandmother Faina, who was in her first trimester, Ira’s mum was about to give birth. She was pushed onto a train to be evacuated, taken off it when her labour started and put back on another train with a newborn in her arms. There was a cloth that she used as an improvised nappy, drying it in one of the train windows as the train moved through the country. With constant bombardments, Ira’s mother quickly lost all her breastmilk and the baby was fed some alarming mixture just to keep her going. Ira didn’t have her first bath until she was a month old, after they finally arrived safely at the place of their evacuation (not surprisingly, she loved that soothing bath so much that she fell asleep straight after). ‘And the children of today,’ says Ira in a voice bristling with irony and energy, ‘a generation of weaklings.’
The three of us walk together around Kiev, Ira consistently outstriding the two generations of weaklings trailing behind her. When we get to my mum’s building on Mezhigorskaya Street in Podol, one of the city’s oldest neighbourhoods, once inhabited by tradesmen and craftsmen, I barely recognise it. I whip out my mobile phone and call my mother in Melbourne just to confirm the precise address. Even Ira is unsure after all this time. Mum gives me the correct number and I hear strain in her voice. I try to hang up as quickly as possible – I understand that I have no right to drag her back here, to her Kiev life, even on the phone. She has made her choice and reached some kind of difficult peace with that choice and I have no right to disturb that peace.
When we finally identify her family’s old home, the block seems so unremarkable and strangely small that my eyes simply slide off it. It is a shadow of the building I remember visiting in my childhood – that one looked important and you could not miss it if you tried. It was the place to which first my grandfather and then the rest of the family returned after Kiev was liberated in 1943 and where they remained more than forty years. They came back to find the city in a terrible state. Khrezhatik, the famous heart of town once lined with blooming chestnut trees, was obliterated by bombs. It had been blown up by the NKVD in the first days of the occupation, but German propaganda blamed the city’s Jews. Victor Nekrasov, who saw Khrezhatik straight after the liberation, remembered ‘mountains of smashed bricks covered by snow with twisted iron beams sticking out of them and narrow paths beaten through snowdrifts. That’s it.’
The building in Mezhigorskaya Street is also the location of my mother’s first memory: She is not even three. In front of her is a white tiled Dutch stove that reaches to the ceiling. The stove is keeping the room warm. Malaria is making her shake with fever. She is going up and down on the precariously perched, high-legged fold-out bed. From all that shaking, the blanket she is covered with falls down on the floor. She cannot reach it, cannot pick it up and cover herself. She is waiting for someone to cover her up again, but no one comes. In her mouth is a bitter taste of quinine. There are twenty apartments in the building. When mum was growing up, she would have gone inside every single one. Life was communal then, especially for kids. Every apartment was occupied by several families. My family was lucky to have only nine in their flat, all relatives too – Mum, her sister Lina, their parents and my grandfather’s mother and sister, with her husband and their two boys. Our family was the first in their building to get a television set; after that a constant procession of neighbours entered the flat. And as on the inside, so on the outside, where communal living continued in the dvor – a yard space between apartment blocks, where parents knew their children could play safely and where kids spent most of their lives, especially before starting school. ‘Any season,’ Mum says, ‘any free time was spent in them.’