My mum is holding Miguel in her arms when Billie and I first walk back into the house. None of us knows how Miguel is going to react to our reappearance after such an insanely long absence: Will he recognise us? Will he reject us or treat us with suspicion or unease? A few minutes later Miguel is on the floor at his own request and my overjoyed mum is hugging my overjoyed daughter. I sit in the armchair and wait. Miguel looks at me and his sister for a while, trying to make sure we do not catch him stare. He says nothing but circles around me slowly and deliberately, like a Sufi whirling ritual, sometimes quickly glancing in my direction and sometimes looking as far away from me as he can. Bit by bit my little boy comes closer, still insistent on maintaining the distance between us, until his body finally touches my leg. He stops. In the corner of my eye I can see my mum and my daughter grow perfectly still. I keep my hands to myself and my sobs in my chest: Miguel had no choice in our leaving, but our return will have to be on his terms. And then my son does a base -jump, sudden and fearless, and lands in my lap. His body locks into mine, and for a while we hold each other in that bare embrace not embellished by words or tears. Then Billie joins us. ‘Gruppen Hug!’ she proclaims (it’s a tradition, a bastardised, family-friendly version of the German word ‘Gruppensex’). ‘Come on, Nanna! Get in here!’ My mum puts her arms around us, and in that moment they seem to me just long enough to embrace us all.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
AT TIMES I FELT so alone writing this book, but now that it is all over I realise just how much support I have had all along. All those gentle giants on whose shoulders I have stood – how could I forget you?
My publisher Meredith Curnow has guided the book’s creation gently and respectfully from start to finish. Nurtured by her patience, intellect and faith in the project, I have felt safe, understood and truly supported. My agent and friend Clare Forster was my brilliant emissary and the book’s most astute and insightful reader. My editor and friend Sybil Nolan has worked day and night to turn a thick maze of impressions, voices, disjointed narratives and impenetrable historical material into an actual book. Yet again – this is our third time together – with Sybil by my side what seemed like a mission impossible metamorphosed into a manuscript proper.
Random House’s senior editor Brandon VanOver brought his talent, humour and humility to the manuscript: gifted hands, I think they call it in surgeons. Thank you to Random House’s Nikki Christer and to writer Elliot Perlman for their support and for believing that this dangerously vague idea could one day turn into a good book.
I must take my virtual hat off to the book’s first readers – Monica Dux, Sarah O’Donnell and Jessica Little, and to my friend Inna for laughing with me at least once a day and for not letting me dry up.
My dear auntie, Mum and Dad – where would I be without your daily, life-giving support? In some kind of metaphorical gutter no doubt. Thank you. And Miguel, thank you for enduring our separation and for taking us back.
I would like to thank my colleagues and management at the Institute for Social Research at Swinburne University where I have been a Post-Doctoral Fellow for the past two and a bit years and where my creative projects have found a great deal of intellectual and logistical support. And to Chris Healy from the University of Melbourne, thank you for all your support in my attempts to be both a writer and an academic.
In writing this book, I have received financial assistance from Australia Council for the Arts and Arts Victoria. Without the generous support from these two organisations, and with two kids and no savings, it could have taken me many years (instead of a year) to finish this manuscript. Thank you.
And finally (did I give you a fright?), my darling Billie, thank you for truly coming along with me, rather than simply playing along (big difference!), for defending your integrity and autonomy, for speaking in your own voice, for saying ‘Well, that’s the truth, put it in’ in response to some of the book’s least flattering passages. I did put it in Billie, it is all there. Scary, I know.
Notes
MANY TIMES IN THE text it has not been possible to attribute sources by name or to quote them at any great length. All of these key sources are acknowledged in full below.
Throughout this book, I have generally relied on my own translations of works originally published in Russian. Any imperfections or infelicities in them are my own responsibility. In fact, most of the Russian sources below are not available in English translation. I reproduce their titles in Russian alongside their English translations so those readers who speak Russian can find them for themselves if so inclined.
Prologue
Dubravka Ugrešic, a Croatian-born writer I admire greatly: Ugrešic is one of the most interesting chroniclers of post-Communism, particularly her novel The Ministry of Pain and her book of essays Thank You for Not Reading. Her reflections on the literary market in the wake of Communism’s collapse come from the essay ‘The Souvenirs of Communism: Home as Marketplace or Deletion of the Past’, The Hedgehog Review, Fall 2005.
Chapter 1: 1989
‘In our day Europeans have been hurled out of their biographies’: Epigraph taken from Osip Mandelstam’s essay ‘Badger Hole’, written in 1922 on the first anniversary of Russian poet Alexander Blok’s death.
Václav Havel once described people living under the Communist system: From Havel’s 1978 essay ‘The Power of the Powerless’, available freely (and in English) on the web.
All is clear by now. By the time there is a government that can satisfy us: To my knowledge, Jvanetsky’s monologues have not been translated. From his sketch ‘No Need to be Afraid’ (‘Бояться не надо’) written in the 1990s. Many of Jvanetsky’s texts are available in Russian on his website – www.jvanetsky.ru.
The Greek-born French novelist Vassilis Alexakis: Alexakis’s reflections come from his book Paris–Athens. It has not been translated into English; those of us who speak neither Greek nor French have to content ourselves with an extract from the book translated in English posted on the website of the online magazine Words Without Borders. The extract was initially written in French and then translated by the author into Greek. So what we have now, rather fittingly, is an English translation of the authored Greek translation of the French original.
‘Like everybody,’ writes Eva Hoffman: Eva Hoffman, Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language, Penguin, 1989. In her memoir, Hoffman, who left Poland in 1959 and became an acclaimed American writer and academic, has some deeply important things to say about what it means to truly inhabit another language.
Chapter 2: Vienna–Moscow
The great tragic history of the emasculation of men: For historical material on creative ways of overcoming shortages of cosmetics and women’s clothes, I’m indebted to the interviews conducted by cultural historian Kseniya Gusarova in ‘“I was never that interested in cosmetics”: Soviet experience of the “artificial beauty”’ (“Я никогда не увлекалась косметикой”: советский опыт “искусственной” красоты), Neprikosnovenniy Zapas 4, 2007.