My Mother

Это перевод рассказа "Моя мама" из сборника "Устная традиция"


As I have already said, my mother came from an urban family—at least four generations of it—while my father came from the Cossacks.

Incidentally, being a Cossack was not the same as being a peasant, although both worked the land. A Cossack belonged to a military estate; the land was secondary to him. He was made for service to the state, which had granted him the right to use violence. His job was to defend the borders and bring the frontier tribes to submission—and, if that required killing someone, to kill. Mostly with a saber or a lance, that is, at close quarters, looking his victim in the face. He was given land in excessive quantities: if he wanted, he could cultivate it; if not, he could rent it out. He was exempt from taxes. Fishing rights and other privileges were added to this. He lived under the authority of his own elders, some of whom were elected. Of all the slaves that the entire population of Russia was—and still is, right up to the second person in the country—the Cossacks were freer than many others.

The price of all this was blood—or, more precisely, lifelong service to the state. My grandfather, though, had been excused from military duty for health reasons, and my father grew up in another era, already a Pioneer and a Komsomol (Young Communist Organization) member. As for me, I was a freethinker from infancy. Yet when my time came, the service-to-the-state gene awoke in me, too.

So much for the digression. This story is supposed to be about my mother.

As I have already written, my mother’s great-grandmother was descended from a noble family and was married off to a "meshchanin"— a townsman—or perhaps a merchant. In any case, he had some kind of trade connected with shoemaking or tailoring in southern Russia.

My mother taught us, all the time. Now, whenever I need to give my words some weight, I begin with:

“My mother used to tell me that…”

And then, depending on the circumstances: you mustn’t put your elbows on the table; you mustn’t disturb or distract someone while they are eating; you mustn’t mention aloud a mistake a guest has made; you mustn’t say unpleasant things to people’s faces; fish should be fried over a high flame; do any task with both hands—and a thousand other such truths.

She was especially particular about posture: sit up straight, stand up straight, keep your hands away from your face. At any moment, my sister could expect to hear, whispered through a smile with lips that barely moved:

-Neck!

Meaning: stretch your neck, tilt your head back. It always came at the most inappropriate moment… “Who needs this, anyway?” I would think resentfully.

One can suppose that her own mother—or, more likely, her grandmother—had drilled her in the same way, following an older tradition established by nannies and governesses. Perhaps this was a bridge to the past, to earlier generations. If so, it ended with me: I taught my children none of these things. Well, as it turns out, their manners are so-so. But it’s too late to teach them now.

We accepted these lessons, more or less, when we were little, but eventually the constant instruction began to irritate us. My sister put up with it all her life, until our mother died. I began to snap back and finally got my way: I received fewer lectures.

Later, the lessons dried up altogether, after my divorce, my bachelor years, and, above all, my scandalous dismissal from work. By that dismissal I had shown the whole world that I didn’t give a damn about everything their worldly wisdom boiled down to: a career and, most importantly, a pension. Trying to teach me how to live was simply a waste of time.

Then I left home, married for the second time, got an apartment to add to the one my wife already had, and had a daughter. Before long, I rebuilt my career, and that disarmed my mother, because I had taken all these steps without consulting her.

After that, we communicated as adults.

But I am getting ahead of myself. For the time being, Mother is teaching us, while we listen to her conversations with friends, acquaintances, and guests at the table. We examine and read documents taken from a little cabinet that is locked against us, with the key hidden away. But nothing can be hidden from my sister. There, in our father’s military ID, we read that he had a wife in Moscow—and it wasn’t Mother. I don’t remember being particularly interested. Well, these things happen… We never asked anyone about it, and to this day we don’t know what it was all about.

Later, Mother began telling us about her life. These stories took place at the kitchen table over lunch, or on the veranda (the porch), where we spent the entire warm season. After eating, we never went our separate ways. We drank tea endlessly and talked. Everything she told us, she later wrote down in her memoirs, so I won’t retell it here, except perhaps for a few minor details.

For example, she never mentioned that in Kharkov, in the house next to hers—a house rented out as a dormitory—there lived a young fellow who wrote poetry in Ukrainian. In those days, they were all Ukrainians. She read his poems to us. One was about the journey of a piece of pork fat, beginning when a peasant brought a pig to market and continuing all the way to the very end—literally, through the intestines.

On our bookshelf stood a three-volume edition of Shevchenko in Ukrainian. Mother tried to read it to me. She brought me Kotliarevsky’s Aeneid, with parallel texts in two languages, and I read it—though in Russian. I probably disappointed her with my opinion of it. I was ten or eleven.

That mock-epic poem really did seem to me, at the time, like low-grade clowning. But I’m afraid my opinion would have been negative in any case. I contradicted everyone back then, but my mother most of all.

I rejected everything she suggested, and this continued, with varying intensity, until I left my parents’ home. My children now reject everything that comes from me, and, strangely enough, so does my wife. The children do it exactly as I did, so one might think this is hereditary. But then what about my wife? She does the same thing.

And so the cycle has repeated itself with me. I am not saddened by it, because I have understood why it happens. I will spare you the long chain of reasoning and give you the conclusion straightaway.

The reason is an excess of love, which exhausts the person being loved. The stronger the force of attraction, the stronger the force of repulsion must be to preserve a safe distance. Otherwise, you will never become yourself, never find your own path, never experience all the joys that come with finding it—or the sorrows, either.

Reject everyone who tries to pull you onto their lap, even if it makes you look like a fool, a scoundrel, or anything else. It is an instinct, and it doesn’t care in the least how reasonable such behavior may appear. Its purpose is to preserve your individuality.

But Mother, of course, did not understand this, and she probably suffered because of my behavior.

I was surrounded by love on all sides, and at first that was natural. But later it began to oppress me. For love also gives the person who loves you the right to demand that you live up to their standards—standards you never wanted to know about in the first place, let alone follow.

So when Mother taught us, her message contained, in addition to its generally useful advice, two other ingredients, like components in a metal alloy: reproach and an imperative to obey immediately.

The reproach might be conveyed in a disapproving tone, as if to say, “How many times have I told you, and all to no avail?” But sometimes it was verbal, too. Mother was not the only one who used it. Everyone around us did: teachers, both of my wives, and I myself. That was the pedagogical tradition. For example, our shop teacher would say to a classmate in front of everyone:

-Your father fought at the war so that you could live, and this is how you behave…

(You’re fidgeting, jumping around, fighting, or doing some other such trifling nonsense.)

What did his father have to do with it? What did the war have to do with it?

What made the situation even more pointed was that the shop teacher had served alongside that classmate’s father. He was also our principal and history teacher, who had lost an arm and an eye in the war, and so, in a way, he had a sacred right to speak like that. The classmate would fall silent for a while, ashamed.

And even that would have been all right, if it hadn’t fostered a lasting sense of guilt: an eternal, groundless guilt toward one’s elders and those treated as elders. I can’t vouch for everyone, but I know it was true of sensitive people—those who spent more time with their parents than was good for them. I include myself, my children, and my wives among them.

Besides, any remark or instruction had to be obeyed without fail, with one’s pride swallowed. It was unpleasant.

And this sense of guilt brought with it a constant need to justify oneself: “Look, Mother, I’m not what you think I am. I’m good.” At the same time, there was a desire to strike first in self-defense, to turn the situation around. It is like a drunk who comes home and immediately starts yelling at his wife, picking at trivialities, preempting the questions she has every right to ask: Where have you been? Who were you drinking with? Where did you get the money?

That summer, when I turned sixteen, Mother sent me to Mariupol, then called Zhdanov, together with my aunt. My aunt left after a couple of weeks, and I stayed there alone with Grandma Kilya, the widow of my mother’s uncle. Mother made me promise to draw their house, and gave me the addresses of neighbors and acquaintances I was supposed to visit. I drew the house and a few other things, but the drawings were later lost during our moves.

I visited the acquaintances, too, and drank tea with them. One frail old woman, after everyone else had left the room, asked me:

-Who are you?

She had probably not heard me introduce myself. I answered. She said:

-Oh, I remember. Before the war, she came to visit us with her husband. Such a distinguished-looking man—a pilot.

I didn’t know what to think. Perhaps the old woman had already lost her memory and confused everything, I thought. My father wasn’t a pilot; he had met Mother at the end of the war. Something was wrong here. But I kept it to myself and never told anyone.

Later, I noticed how sadly Mother watched the film Fighters on television, with Mark Bernes singing “Beloved City.” Looking at her, I imagined her as a young woman, with her young husband, watching that film in a garrison club on the border. Somewhere nearby, on a grassy field, planes just like those in the film— I-16s—were warming up their engines. I didn’t know whether my father knew about this. But I thought it possible that he didn’t.

I dared to ask her about it only when I began writing the history of our family. That was when she sent me her notes, which included the story of her brief first marriage, destroyed by the war. A death notice had arrived for her husband. He had been killed somewhere near Kharkov. He wasn’t a pilot, actually, but a member of the ground crew. Still, the uniform was an air-force uniform. So the old woman had been telling the truth after all.

In that same Zhdanov—Mariupol—I met an old Trotskyist on the beach. I also saw Richard III at the theater, performed by actors from the Kaliningrad Drama Theater. It impressed me so much that, when I returned, I read all of Shakespeare and memorized several of his monologues.

Once, at work, I was assigned to make a New Year’s wall newspaper, and I began working on it at home. First, I covered the stretcher frame with black ink. I planned to glue onto it a raised snow-woman made from tracing paper, crumpled up and then smoothed out, with breasts sticking out and a real broom in her hand. Then I was going to glue all sorts of tinsel onto the black background. That is what I eventually did—but not at home.

Mother saw it and said anxiously:

-You shouldn’t paint everything black. People might say you’re blackening reality. You could get into trouble.

And this was already the late seventies. What was it—a lingering echo of Komsomol meetings where people’s personal affairs were put on trial? How many ruined lives had she seen in her own lifetime, for her to be so afraid that something like that might happen to me?

I first sat down at a computer when I was fifty, already in America. I learned quickly and easily, and enjoyed the work: turning my boss’s vague sketches into drawings and three-dimensional models. And they even paid me for it!

I regretted that Mother wasn’t there behind my back. If only she could have seen how skillfully I handled it, how pleased she would have been for me. And then I seemed to hear her slightly anxious voice:

-Don’t rush, sonny. Don’t click the keys so fast. Better to think it through carefully each time before you do…