I do not know if my daughter could see any of it even for a moment and, if she did, could this glimpse of her mother’s undiminished life cure her of condescension, of the quick emotions of a tourist, be they shock or awe, of the eagerness with which we let ourselves be fooled by places? Since our return to Australia, Billie has written several more things in her diary. Her post-trip voice is markedly different from the one that ascends from most pages of her diary as a guttural lament and a Baroque fugue at once. It is not simply that Billie can be more lucid or reflective now that she is no longer caught up in the emotions of the trip and, perhaps even more importantly, no longer infuriatingly dependent on her mother, it is just that she is already a different Billie. I keep forgetting how it all goes in this age-bracket, that I’ll be lucky simply to be able to keep up.
Dear Diary,
After a journey like this I think you are expected to have a certain reaction to it all. I think you are meant to change your outlook on the world and go, ‘Oh, I am so lucky, blu di-blu di-blah!’ I have had an image of what a perfect person in my situation would feel and believe after coming back from Russia and Ukraine. There is something in me that makes me think that I should start blessing every crumb of food that I had. But that’s not what it’s like for me.
‘But this is all the “poor, desperate, Third-World Russia and Ukraine” kind of stuff – what about everything else?’ I ask Billie.
‘Yes, the people were amazing and the architecture and culture were beautiful, but the way people live, I’m sorry, Mum, I just could not get over it. Not the city centres, but – how should I put it? – in the outer suburbs. I wish we went there when I was older. I am a different person now; I would have gotten so much more out of this trip.’
‘But imagine how infuriating you would have found me these days!’ I am half-teasing Billie, half-stating the fearful fact.
‘Yes, that’s true, but you are still the only person I would want to travel with.’
Before we left Australia I debated with myself how best to prepare Billie for what lay ahead of us. Should I avoid giving her a pep talk, or try to scare the living daylights out of her? Rereading those pre-departure thoughts, I am surprised by how off the mark I was. How could I have been so blind to the possibility that it was our own relationship that would prove the most contentious part of the trip, our relationship and, of course, Billie’s ‘beginner’ Russian? If only she could speak for herself, if only she could communicate with others as an equal. As to the things that worried me – the woes, mishaps and mini-crises – none of them really mattered in the end, not even the God-awful toilets. (On the last leg of our flight home, Bangkok to Melbourne, she entertained herself by joyfully compiling a list of the worst toilets we had experienced.) In fact, Billie counts our detour to Belarus as one of her fondest memories of the trip: Everything was so terrible at first and then it all turned around, and we were eating ice-cream and a comical dinner of pickles, sausage and biscuits and feeling so warm and at home. I just felt so purely happy and comfortable with myself and everything around. I have absolutely no idea why, but remembering this moment makes me smile every time.
Remembering this moment makes me smile too. This was a moment that could have so easily come from my childhood – the best-laid plans decimated, an unexpected detour to some hellhole, hours of waiting, and in the middle of this the best, the purest kind of happiness. What was good for the book turned out also to be good for my daughter and me.
I think rather ruefully about the timing of our trip, just as Billie was preparing to go to high school. Did I get it really wrong? (My daughter, for one, thinks so.) But when exactly is that mythical ‘right time’ when children are perfectly receptive to the stories their parents have been dying to tell them? I was desperate for Billie to feel attached, entangled, viscerally connected to her family’s history. And do you know what? I think she actually does. Not the way I would have wanted her to, of course – she did not rush home from the airport and straight into the Russian language school; she did not hang maps of Europe on her bedroom wall (right next to the poster of Audrey Hepburn that dominates it now); nor did she torture her grandparents and beloved great-aunt with questions: ‘And then what happened? And then?’ But I do think she saw something deep and important – that the spider veins of our family history spread well beyond the world familiar to her. That the act of going anywhere beyond the boundaries of that familiar world asked of us at a bare minimum that we unlearn many of the connections between people, places, history and fate we thought self-evident (cutting a branch while sitting on it if need be).
‘If where people lived was a reflection of who they were inside,’ Billie wrote in the diary, ‘only murderers and villains should have lived in Kharkov.’ Only in Kharkov and all the other places we went, people she met were magnificent in their generosity and loyalty: ‘These people who had barely anything compared to what I knew in Australia and we came into their houses and they gave us absolutely everything they had. They were so open and completely un-self-centred, and that experience was amazing.’ So analyse that, Billie Tumarkin.
I open Billie’s diary straight onto the last entry written almost a year after the trip:
Dear Diary,
Throughout the trip things with Mum would go up and down. Sometimes we’d be best friends, and other times I would just start screaming at her for no given reason. I felt so frustrated, and everything was so foreign and there was nothing that I knew besides Mum. And it’s pretty much impossible especially for me, to remain on good terms with someone 24/7 for over a month. I don’t think that in the long run it actually affected our relationship. If I hadn’t have gone on this trip with Mum, I would have still at this same period of time gotten frustrated and angry with her. And the location of this in the end really did not matter.
This trip was like four seasons in one day. I felt absolutely every single emotion on the spectrum but, even though it was really hard, I’d go back and do it again and again and again.
Could it be that we actually never find out what is really happening between us and our kids if we stay home? I saw something of myself on this trip that I was not prepared to recognise before, what a bizarre and dangerous hybrid I was – a libertine parent who gave Billie all kinds of petty freedoms and privileges, and an autocrat intent on mercilessly scrutinising her inner life. I saw how desperately I was hanging on to her, while on the surface making all the right ‘loosening the leash’ moves. I saw – I couldn’t miss it if I tried – that Billie was like an iceberg that needed to break off the big mamma iceshelf to survive. And that there was not much I could do but watch myself receding in the distance. I recognise now that the real reason we went away together on our trip was so that we could come back and start learning how to live apart. Adolescence is just like all the other parents warn you it will be – at least a seven on the Richter scale. And now we are where you would expect us to be, being blown around and around. One day in a few years, the tempest will stop, I know. My mum got through it with my sister and me, and I will too.