After Love (30 page)

‘There is a word
Toska
in Russian. I don't know the English translation but I remember one of Chekhov's stories called
Toska
. One dark wintry evening in St Petersburg a coachman tries to tell his passengers about the death of his young son. But no one gives a damn about his loss, he soon realises. He whispers instead to a tired horse happily munching rotten oats from a bag hung round his neck. Snow falls, the horses move wearily forward, bells ring, the footmen shout, and an old woman slips and collapses. No one comes to help her either. That's not in the story; I just imagined it.

‘Loneliness is bliss when you want to be alone but a curse when it's thrust upon you. That's when you feel abandoned, like Chekhov's coachman.'

I wrote down this conversation with Mama in my diary. I miss her and although I'm in India with Papa, I feel lonely without her. I had asked Mandy and her boyfriend Patrick to come with me. We enjoy travelling together. Mandy is strong and very daring whereas Patrick makes us laugh, keeping our spirits up. They've gone to Bangalore and will spend a fortnight in South India. Then I'll catch up with them in Jaipur and we'll make a short trip across the desert, returning to Delhi to fly back home.

The long trek through Bhutan exhausted me. I'm still suffering from diarrhoea and a sore throat. A young girl called Malati, only a couple of years older than me, looks after me here in Delhi. She complains when I try to help her with the housework.

‘Your job is to give orders, little
memsahib
,' she tells me, ‘and mine to follow.' I enjoy being pampered but feel ashamed to be waited on by her all the time. She tells me that Papa usually lives by himself in this big house, calling on her only when he has guests. But she knows that I'm not a guest. She must realise that I'm his daughter. What puzzles her is my inability to speak Hindi. When I explain to her that I was born in Australia and that my mother comes from Russia, this confuses her even more. She laughs when I refuse to sit in a rickshaw and be pulled by old men, and disapproves when I give money to each and every beggar on the street.

‘It's not right,' she scolds me. ‘You're spoiling them.'

I've travelled with Papa and met some great people. We went across the Siwaliks to the Doon Valley and then up to Mussoorie in the mountains. We spent three days walking and trekking.

Papa took me to a village where he has started a new project. The idea is to build ecologically sustainable houses for sugarcane farmers. The two main problems are no cheap fuel and no water you can drink. If the fuel isn't cheap enough, they chop down trees. The alternative is to use dried cakes of cow dung. They're free, but the acrid smoke in the little huts with no windows causes problems. So Dr Sharma, one of Papa's colleagues at the University, has designed a new type of stove. It uses briquettes made of dried leaves. They burn really well and provide more heat.

‘Local technology for local problems,' he said. He's right. He's also experimenting with a portable solar cooker which looks like an overhead projector and costs only a few hundred rupees.

At home Malati uses the same sort of cooker to make boiled rice and kidney beans. It's dead simple. Two separate pots with rice and beans are placed in the cooker at around eight in the morning and by noon they are nicely cooked. Dr Sharma is convinced that cooking like this can reduce the use of electricity or gas by up to twenty-five percent.

He showed me some brochures. They're too simple to attract buyers outside India. Here the cookers will sell well. They would also be great in Australia where the summers are long and sunny. But can we Australians be bothered? We laze around and go to the beach, consume a lot and waste even more.

In India, according to Papa, the main problem is water. Most of the water the villagers use is straight out of the river. Even after boiling, it's not completely safe to drink. Sinking tube wells is the only solution. But the water from them is often contaminated with arsenic.

Papa has found a guitar for me in one of the shops in Mussoorie and I've written two new songs. One of them is about a little girl I often see in the park outside. She sits on the brick fence and watches kids her age play hopscotch. Her right leg is twisted from the polio she suffered as a child.

The other song is about Mama. Do I miss her? It seems I do. I used to think I could live happily without her around. Not true. My freedom from her lasted only five days. Of course I don't miss her whining and whingeing, her endless pestering me to do this or that, but I do like her being around. I miss her voice and the way she walks, swiftly and softly.

When I left home six weeks ago, Mama was rehearsing Gorecki's
Symphony of Sorrowful Songs
with the Symphony Orchestra. It's great that she is going back to music, and this time it looks long-term. She always took the lessons she gave very seriously, going out of her way to help her students. I used to sit through the lessons and listen because I love the way she talks about music.

‘Why did you drop archaeology?' I asked her once.

‘Because I don't feel at home anywhere,' she said, ‘and not because I don't want to. When I left Russia I left my past tucked in those suitcases I abandoned – and I'm glad I did,' she said.

‘What about doing archaeology in Australia?'

‘Here it's even more difficult,' she said. ‘I don't have any feeling for the land or the people or their histories. The land is beautiful, no doubt, and the people too are honest, fair-minded and proud. Yet I still feel uneasy. It's as if there is something immoral, inherently wrong, for Europeans like me to be living here. Even my cello seems out of place. Once I asked Milos to find me a didgeridoo player with whom I could improvise some Bach. He completely dismissed the idea. He called it not only stupid but ridiculous.'

She looked at me. ‘Tell me, is it really so ridiculous?'

I didn't know what to say. I was confused myself. But for her to ask Milos was even more ridiculous. How would he know, the pompous old bastard? I don't like him at all. I know that without him our lives would be much harder. But he really is a dishonest prick.

‘I don't feel at home anywhere.' Mama often says that. But what does it really mean? I don't understand her angst. Perhaps I'm too young. Perhaps I don't want to belong to a particular place or people. Just travel like a global citizen? But what about my Australian passport with my stamped photo? ‘Tattooed forever,' as Mandy says.

Why is the world so complicated?

Before we left, Mandy came from Perth to stay with us. We went with Mama to the dentist to get a tooth that was giving her trouble treated. Mama riffled through an old
National Geographic
and I heard her ask the receptionist if she could borrow the magazine for a few days to photocopy an article.

At home she pulled out a typed manuscript which looked really old. It was an English translation of her thesis on the Scythian town of Gelon. The article she had found in
National Geographic
was about the gold dug from the Siberian kurgans; it also had an interview with one of the professors she had worked with.

Later that evening I saw her reading another manuscript, the book she had never finished. I found the manuscript in the garbage bin the next morning.

I took it out. The cover and the page listing the contents were ripped. I found sticky-tape to repair the damage and put the manuscript carefully away in a box.

In India I once went to Papa's lecture on the architecture of nomadic camps and settlements. The theatre was packed. His assistant told me later that his lectures were very popular and that students from all over the campus came to hear him.

‘He's a bit of a celebrity you know, your father,' she said and smiled.

‘Why didn't Mama finish her book?' I asked him afterwards. He looked at me in surprise. It was the first time I had called her ‘Mama' to him. And until then, discussing her had remained out of bounds.

‘I don't know. She should have. It's such a good book, you know. Have you read it?'

‘Only the first few pages. Did you help her with the translation?'

‘Yes of course. And she was kind enough to mention that I did. She shouldn't have. I didn't deserve it, not at all—'

‘Are you sure?'

‘Absolutely. She helped me too, with my work, far more than she realises.'

‘How?'

He laughed. ‘By keeping in check my infatuation with Marxism.'

‘Is that over now? I mean, the infatuation?'

‘The infatuation is, but not my faith in it or my hope that it could still succeed. Equality and freedom for all. Who can resist a dream like that?'

He paused and smiled. ‘I still sound like a true believer, don't I?'

‘Yes. But is there anything wrong in believing in something so splendid?'

‘
Splendid, where did that come from?
' I thought.

Again he looked surprised. ‘I remember saying something similar to your Mama once when she was helping me edit my thesis. I wanted to use a famous quotation from Marx. She read it and said: “Do your really believe in all this?”'

‘Did you? And do you still believe it?' I asked.

‘Yes to both. But I've also become more sceptical these days. I'm a rational believer and I've selected the ideas which fit in with what I want to do now. The romanticism has sadly gone. Like a vulture I've picked the juicy bits and left the rest to rot.'

‘So you were a romantic revolutionary once?'

‘Yes. Aren't you? All those songs about the little girl with polio, the sweat-shop kids and the famines in Africa. I got the bug from Uncle Triple K. Like every true Marxist he wanted to change the world. And of course I was trained as a scientist and Marxism seemed so neat and ordered. Its beauty lies in the very simplicity of its conceptual architecture: base, superstructure, dialectics, alienation. It seems engrained in the very nature of things to move towards a final resolution, a sort of nirvana.'

I wanted to change the subject before he got too carried away. ‘Why do you call her “your Mama” and not “Anna”?' I challenged.

‘Perhaps that's the only way I can think of her now. You're the bridge between whatever remains of us two.' He looked sad. ‘But bridge isn't the right word. You're a semicolon perhaps, a sort of stop-start.' He smiled. ‘I hope you don't mind being called a semicolon. It's just a metaphor—'

‘A semicolon? I think that's funny. Do you still love her?'

‘No.'

‘Do you miss her?'

‘Yes,' he said immediately. No pause, no hesitation.

‘How do you miss her?' I was scared that I was going too far. He had every right to tell me to shut up. But he didn't.

‘I miss her cello, the way she used to play, embracing it. I miss the songs she used to sing and the stories she told about the land and the cities buried underneath. I miss her passion. I miss the way she walked with her arm in my arm when we were in Venice, her laugh, her smell that always made me snuggle up to her—'

He paused for a moment and then said something terribly sweet: ‘And I miss the way she would let me cuddle up to her, with my arm around her belly and my finger in her belly—'

‘—button.' Oh my God! How embarrassing! I too was fond of that comfy spot. I told him that Mama would try to remove my hand after I had fallen asleep but that it would always return to the lovely little knot.'

‘Isn't it silly of us to talk like this?' he asked.

‘Not at all. She's my Mama. I love her a lot and you loved her too, once upon a time. Isn't that so?'

‘Yes, once upon a time.'

‘But you never found anyone else. This house hasn't even the faintest smell of a woman. You've stayed lonely, unattached, unwanted—'

And that's where he stopped me. ‘No more,' he said, and walked out of the room.

I sat quietly for a while until Malati came in to see if I wanted tea or coffee and to tell me that dinner would be ready soon.

I heard Papa working in his study. Then he put on some music: a Bach cello suite.

I got up and went into the kitchen to watch Malati roll
chapatis
. She asked if I wanted to help her. She showed me how to use the little towel to press them from one side so that they rise and grow fluffy, soft on one side and crunchy on the other.

That evening Papa showed me Irina's photo. Then on his computer we looked together at the aerial shots she had taken of Venice, Paris, Rome and Budapest.

‘
Are you lovers?
' I wanted to ask. He looked happy when he talked about her, which I liked, but which also made me sad. Because of Mama? Perhaps.

She will certainly enjoy hearing me called a semicolon. Just imagine: I open the door, walk in, and she calls, ‘Who's there?'

‘A metaphor,' I reply.

I bet she'll complain that I'm becoming more and more like him. Am I?