Calligraphy Lesson (15 page)

In periods away from one another we'd exchange letters. About anything and everything. I thought up various charades for him, crosswords, riddles. In each letter he'd pose tricky questions of his own, such as: If steam is lighter than water, then why is ice not heavier than water, but lighter?

He's all grown-up now, but he still rounded off that email with one of his riddles.

He's twenty-three now, an adult.

By the age of sixteen I already knew everything about myself. I knew what I wanted from this life: to write books and to travel. And I knew that this was impossible. Because I was born into a country where whatever I might write would never be published, and beyond whose borders I would never be allowed to travel. This was a slave-country, and my slave-parents had birthed me into bondage. I knew exactly what I wanted, but it was all impossible—and I felt like a disconsolate wretch.

My son, in contrast, has it all within his grasp: he's already travelled half the world, he writes, makes films, gives concerts of his own music. But he still doesn't truly know what he wants from this life. Which makes him feel wretched, too.

Happiness, most likely, is conditional neither on liberty nor on its lack.

There I was, strolling along the track in the direction of Leukerbad, the air laden with the sharp aromas of the warm sunlit forest, of pine resin and wild strawberries, and I pondered what it was that wouldn't fit into a saucepan big enough to hold the Milky Way, all the galaxies, and the entire universe from beginning to end?

And then I encountered my father. He was walking towards me, a rucksack on his shoulders, sturdy mountain boots on his feet, sun-bronzed, healthy, young. This was my father, but not as I knew him in his final years, a grey-haired, gnarly guzzler. This was the father I remembered from my childhood. I stopped, astounded, while he strode over to me, nimbly and vigorously, as does a weary traveler at the conclusion of a whole day spent on mountain paths, with the end of a long, splendid hike finally in sight.

Drawing level with me, he smiled and said, “
Grüezi!
”

“
Grüezi!
” I replied.

And he strode on towards Brentschen.

The fact that my father had spoken to me in Swiss German brought me back to reality. Needless to say, this young man, many years my junior, could not be my father, delivered to the flames of a Moscow crematorium in his sailor's uniform seventeen years previously.

During the war my father had been a submariner in the Baltic, and a photograph of his Shchuka hung on our wall. That Daddy had a submarine was a source of great pride for me as a child, and I'd constantly be making drawings of the photo in my school exercise book, carefully inscribing the number Shch-310 on the submarine's nose. Every ninth of May—Victory Day—my father would get out his sailor's uniform, which he was always having altered to accommodate his ever-growing belly, and pinned on all his badges. Later I grew up a bit and realized that in 1944 and 1945 my father helped sink German ships which were evacuating refugees from Riga and Tallinn. Hundreds if not thousands of people met their deaths in the waters of the Baltic—for which my father was decorated. I've long since ceased being proud of him, but nor do I condemn him. There was a war on, and my father won in that war. He was avenging his brother.

My father went off to war as a volunteer at the age of eighteen—to avenge Boris, he would tell me. His older brother was killed in the summer of 1941.

As a child I'd spend every summer at my grandmother's, in the holiday village of Udelnaya near Moscow. A wall in her room was hung with old photos. One showed her sons: two teenage brothers sitting in embrace, head to head, floppy ears touching. Nowadays everyone always smiles on photos, but these two gazed seriously into the camera as if they had foreknowledge of everything that would soon happen to them.
Another snapshot showed a youth in headphones: a ham-radio aficionado, Boris was training to be a telephonist.

I remember Grandma unfolding the frayed old sheet of paper marked “
NOTIFICATION
,” kissing it and wiping away tears. He was twenty. Looking at my son today, I find this simply impossible to imagine. He's just a boy still, no more than a kid. But back then, Boris seemed like a big grown-up hero to me.

My grandfather was a peasant from down Tambov way. He was arrested in the midst of collectivization in 1930. Grandma would tell me about how, when requisitioners arrived at their yard to take away the cow, he became indignant at being left with nothing to feed two little children. He was arrested and sent off to Siberia to build the Baikal–Amur Mainline. He managed to pass on two short letters before vanishing. When Grandma was dying, aged ninety-five, her mind started going a bit, and everything that happened to her in 1930 began resurfacing. I'd phone her, I remember, and at first she'd speak to me as normal, but then she'd suddenly start asking, “Who is this? Misha? Who's Misha?” And I'd tell her, “It's me, Misha!” Her husband, my grandfather, was also called Mikhail, and she'd scream down the phone, “What are you doing? Leave him be! Don't take him away! Let him go! Misha, where are they taking you?” She had been transported back to that year, and her husband was being arrested all over again. To avoid dying of hunger, Grandma had to flee the village with her two children, my father and Uncle Borya. She found a job as a cleaner near Moscow before spending the rest of her life as a kindergarten nurse.

On every form he filled out, my father held back the fact that he was the son of an enemy of the people, and he lived his whole life in fear that this would come out into the open. It's so important for a son to be proud of his father. But it was fear, not pride, that dwelt in my father's soul.

That frayed and yellowed document Grandma kissed and cried over wasn't actually a notice of death, but a notification that Boris was missing in action somewhere in the Kandalaksha area. Such an odd word that it stuck in my memory. This is a small town in Karelia. Now I realize she was forever hoping that he hadn't perished, that he was still alive somewhere. “Missing in action”—what does this mean, exactly? Could mean anything. And she thought, What if he's still alive, what if we're to meet again? And my father harboured the same hope about his brother.

Grandma died in '93, my father in '95. And then, in 2010, something happened—the sort of thing that normally happens in films or books, not in real life. I was in Norway. A translation of my novel
Maidenhair
had been released there, and I was invited on a tour of speaking engagements across several cities. My Norwegian translator Marit Bjerkeng and I were strolling around Tromsø, a town in the country's far north, and we popped into the small local museum. Two diminutive rooms housed an exhibition about Soviet POWs in Norway during the war years. The retreating Germans evacuated their camps from Finland to the Tromsø region. And all of a sudden I remembered that word from my childhood—Kandalaksha. That was where the notification had come from! Kandalaksha was somewhere in Karelia. And I thought, what if my Uncle Borya had been captured there, and was then transferred to Norway in 1944 together with the other prisoners? Marit helped me make an enquiry to the Norwegian archives. A copy of the registration card of POW Boris Shishkin was found immediately and sent to me by email.

POW'S PERSONAL CARD. ISSUED AUGUST
29, 1941.
STALAG
309. All their camps were called Stalag—a contraction of Stammlager. This number designated a network of camps in Finland. Every POW was given a metal ID tag, and his number was 1249.
SHISHKIN, BORIS. BORN DECEMBER
30, 1920,
IN THE VILLAGE OF NOVO-YURIEVO. NATIONALITY: RUSSIAN.
PRIVATE, MILITARY UNIT NUMBER. CIVILIAN PROFESSION: RADIO-MECHANIC. TAKEN CAPTIVE AUGUST
27.
IN GOOD HEALTH. FINGERPRINT. SURNAME AND ADDRESS OF KIN IN POW'S COUNTRY OF ORIGIN. MOTHER: LYUBOV SHISHKINA
—my grandmother.

Reading this, I came into a sharp realization of what it was to be resurrected from the dead. This person, my twenty-year-old uncle, now thirty-three years my junior—this boy had suddenly come back to life! And it hurt so much that neither my grandmother nor my father had lived to see this day.

I went straight off to the Internet, and you can find everything there, including information on this Stammlager 309. Photographs, investigations, documents. Stories of people who were imprisoned there and survived. There were even photographs of firing-squad executions taken on the sly by a German soldier. POWs were predominantly employed in construction—they built railways. I read about POW telephonists—and realized: of course, that was him! He must have been given work within his profession!

On the reverse of the card was a note:
ES BESTEHT DIE VERMUTUNG, DASS DER KRIEGSGEFANGENE JUDE IST, LAUT AUSSAGEN EINES VERTRAUTEN MANNES. WURDE AM
25.7.1942
DER SICHERHEITSPOLIZEI ÜBERGEBEN
. Which means he was shot.

In the course of my Internet research on Stalag 309 I came across a photograph of executed POWs in a big pit. Perhaps one of them was my father's brother.

How can I convey this feeling? My uncle Borya has just been resurrected—and he's been killed again. It's a good thing after all, I remember thinking, that Dad and Grandma didn't live to see this!

That he was killed as a Jew is, of course, astonishing. He was of Tambov peasant stock, going back generations. Evidently someone had got square with him: the slightest denunciation might get you shot.

I set about tracking down that photograph from my childhood. Our family archive was destroyed ten years ago when my brother's house near Moscow burnt down. I got in contact with my father's last wife, Zinaida Vasilievna, but after moving house numerous times she had nothing left. It's extraordinary: I see it right before my eyes, that prewar snap of the youth in headphones, but it exists nowhere except within me.

Every document, every photograph, everything that should be kept in the family from generation to generation—it has all perished. But it all still survives in what remains of that machine of death. Why? How on earth can this be?

I was also struck that a Russian translation had been written onto the card in someone's hand. Who did the translation? What for? When? There was a Russian stamp, too:
PERSONAL REGISTRATION CARD AMENDED. REFERENCE NUMBER
452. 1941. And a handwritten word: Notified. Meaning that Boris's mother, my grandmother, had been sent the paper she was to cry over for so many years.

It turned out that all these archives were transferred to Russia after the war and are held to this day in Podolsk, near Moscow. My grandmother and my father lived so many years in ignorance of their Boris's fate, and it was their own country, for whose sake Boris had died, that held the truth back from them. Only after Perestroika were the archives opened temporarily, and Western historians made copies of them. I received Uncle Borya's card from the Norwegian archives within a single week, yet Grandma and Dad received no news of him from their own state in a whole lifetime.

Information concerning POWs was kept secret because in reality the state was waging war against its own people. My relatives, my loved ones lived out their entire lives in a prison nation which used them for its wars and despised them.

When Perestroika began, my father made an enquiry to the KGB about the fate of his father. All the victims of Stalin's repressions were being rehabilitated. He showed me an official letter confirming the rehabilitation of his father, my grandfather. Charges were being dismissed for lack of
corpus delicti.
Dad had been tanking up since morning and would only bellow, “Bastards! Bastards!”

After the war he drank his whole life through. And all his submariner friends, too. They probably couldn't do otherwise. It was the disease of their generation. Aged eighteen, he spent months on end immured in a submarine, haunted by the constant fear of drowning in an iron coffin. An experience like that can shackle you for the rest of your life.

Under Gorbachev, when the really hungry years began, my veteran father received food parcels containing produce from Germany. In his eyes this represented a personal humiliation. He and his friends had seen themselves as victors their whole lives, and now he was forced to feed from the hand of the vanquished foe. He regarded the collapse of the USSR as defeat in a war he had waged together with the rest of the country. My father hated Gorbachev.

I didn't like Gorbachev either, but precisely for the reason that he did everything in his power to prevent the collapse of the USSR and the entire Soviet system. My father and I viewed the history being made around us from opposite vantage points. There was an unbridgeable gulf between us. We had long since ceased to be close to one another. And this, of course, had little to do with politics.

The final straw leading to our estrangement came at my wedding. Inviting him, I remember, was a conciliatory gesture on my part. Dad got drunk, started a punch-up, and I had to restrain him with the help of a friend and pack him off home in a taxi. It was hard for me to forgive him such things.

It's so important to be proud of one's father. But I was ashamed of mine.

I started communicating with him again only shortly before his death. He spent his last years simply destroying himself with vodka. Denied his drink, he'd start smashing up everything in the house. Zinaida Vasilievna stopped fighting for him—she herself would buy him his bottles so he'd get sozzled and quickly pass out. He drank so much it seemed strange his body was still holding up. All his submariner friends had long since drunk themselves into the grave. My father must've been in a hurry to rejoin his war buddies. Out of their whole boat he was the last man standing.