We speak on the phone once a month or so these days. The phone, of course, is hard. It was much easier when we were simply next to each other. But it does not matter, because I know that the cynical, tense and suspicious undertones are gone. We are not on our guard, we are not second-guessing each other.
Sasha will come to Australia, it is just a matter of time. Secretly I am working on a plan to help her immigrate here, since she has no family left in Ukraine. I have floated the idea and she has not rejected it out of hand. Is the secret plan just for Sasha’s benefit, or is it for mine as well? The cynics would say that I am doing this entirely for me, domesticating my past or healing some private wound of my own. I cannot demolish such accusations, all I can say is that I honestly do not believe that is my motive. I remember Dina Rubina’s words about running her hand across her chest and feeling the stitch holding the two parts of her together. Finally, after all this time, I am fine with my stitch, it no longer feels like it is concealing an injury or a disfigurement. It is simply a distinguishing mark. I have not ‘embraced’ my stitch, rest assured, but twenty years have gone and it has simply become part of my skin. The past may be a foreign country, who am I to argue this point, but Sasha, Marina, young Katya, Petya, Natasha, Tanya do not live in that country. I have been there, so I know.
EPILOGUE
AT KHARKOV INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT – the size of someone’s ostentatious villa – we wait for the plane that will take us to Vienna. We are used to shiny, vast, frenetic, alpha-spaces – pleasantly cool no matter what the temperature is outside, bright no matter the time – but in Kharkov the airport looks more like a monk’s cave: dark, silent and medieval. At the check-in our suitcase is pushed through what looks like an opening in the wall; I see a pair of hands grabbing it from the other side. For a moment I fear that it is gone for good. Our tiny plane is like a poor, emaciated cousin to all the big, beefy Boeings out there, so small it seems fragile and painfully unsure of itself.
Yet again I cannot wait to leave, and yet again I feel overcome by regret. We should not be going now. It is too soon. I, for one, am not ready. But this time the equation is pretty basic. Miguel is waiting for us in Australia. He has turned one and a half today, and we haven’t seen him for almost six weeks. And so in the airport lounges of Kharkov, Vienna and Bangkok, Billie and I pore over his blurry photos on my mobile, noticing that on most of them he waves his hand. (’A distinctly presidential wave,’ says Billie.) We piece together the last sighting of Miguel before we left – our little boy with a bruised eye and scratched nose, feeling something, clinging desperately to his mother, the three of us singing ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’ with an abandon more befitting a rousing gospel number.
‘Next time we will come with Miguel,’ says Billie. ‘We will wait till he is three or four, and we will all come together. We will show him St Petersburg, we will take him to Kharkov. Let’s make it a family tradition.’ Whether it is a passing moment of magnanimity now that we are on our way home, or she really means it, I cannot tell. I am simply grateful for these words, for the fact that Billie can imagine the three of us coming back together.
‘Insofar as we retain the capacity for attachment,’ writes Eva Hoffman, ‘the energy of desire that draws us toward the world and makes us want to live within it, we’re always returning.’ But returning not only to that first place that we have known and loved and which is the source of our ‘original heat and hunger for the forms of the world’, but returning also to other places in our lives and, perhaps, in the lives of our parents as well.
In Melbourne several months later, Billie writes about Kharkov, about how it felt to actually see the places in all those stories her mother, Nanna and great-aunt had for years told her. She writes about coming to our dvor, the place she was perhaps most curious to see, since the stories she had heard about it made it sound positively enchanted. What Billie says catches me by surprise – only why on earth should I be surprised? There is something in her words so emblematic of the experience ofsecond-generation homecoming, of the kind of travelling required to go from family stories to actual places that are never, not even remotely, the way you imagined them to be.
Dear Diary,
‘Dvor’ is a kind of communal garden for apartments in one block. I have heard many stories from Mum and Nanna about ‘dvor’, where the old and young coexisted in their separate corners of the same world – games of hide-and-seek and snow chucking, nannies with prams, old women eating sunflower seeds and drunken fathers smoking on the children’s playground. You had your friends and half the population of your school living next door to you and everyone would be in shouting distance from each other, so instead of organising meetings with your friends you could have a spontaneous wish to see them and all it took was to shout their name loud enough and they would be beside you. The idea of having something that resembled a park as your shared backyard was so appealing, the joy of going nowhere to be surrounded by friends, where transport was as simple as your own two feet and the range of your communications depended on the size of your lungs.
But unlike Dorothy who found Oz so much more colourful, bright and appealing than home, there was no magical yellow brick road and no Emerald City awaiting me. Dear Diary, instead of happy children playing on the bright yellow playgrounds, I found, well… to tell you the truth, a rubbish tip.
I would have never used the word ‘garden’. I could not possibly, because it would have gentrified the whole experience, made it sound like some kind of a New Age local community veggie garden slash adventure playground. After all, we are talking here about dirty, rectangular blobs of space between adjoining apartment buildings with benches, rubbish bins, some trees and occasionally some playground equipment thrown in. There were some beautiful dvory steeped in history and literary allusions, most notably in central Moscow and St Petersburg, but not where we lived. Yet dvor was our default location growing up. It was, and Billie got this absolutely right, both the place and the time of my childhood.
I had no idea how Billie would see it – that, first and foremost, she would be taken aback by the smell. Rotting rubbish, human and animal urine, the odours decrepit buildings tend to ooze. She was also scared of the stray dogs, which often ran around in tight, growling packs. Those dogs, I must say, have grown significantly more vicious in the two decades since we left. Perhaps they are simply hungrier now. But that is not the point. I was wondering if it is possible to imagine how a space that looks so barren and decaying could be a source of such joy, of such complex cultural exchanges, of so much friendship and daily, mind-boggling accommodation. If, for a moment, Billie could see what I see, she would see, not some kind of nostalgic, euphoric, rose-coloured vision of a ‘communal garden’, but a place, which was just the way it was meant to be. We are born into spaces and we grow up in them. We are blessed not to know any better. As children we do not smell three weeks’ worth of rubbish that makes adults gag. We play with the puddles in which grown-ups step, cursing bad roads and general disorder and decay. We fit whatever size is given to us. And the dirt is much more fun to play with than sand. We are not deprived. We are not to be pitied. We are on top of the world.