FAMILY PHOTO ALBUM

Published in "Akh" Magazine, №3, 2002

My forefathers were not quite
The same: a rabbi and a knight.
One was a hero of his time,
By way of drinking seas of wine,
The other sought his inspiration
In sacred books and contemplation.

Alexander Tokarev

They both studied in the Leningrad Fine Arts' Academy. Both had something to hide from the Soviet State. Father's nobleman roots, as well as Mother's rabbinical pedigree were both taboo items. Many years later Father would recall how they lived in their Teterki village on the Mecha river in the Tula district. My grandmother, astride the black steed that Grandfather once gave her, dressed in an Amazon riding costume, would charge to visit her cousins living in the nearby estate, followed by peasants' grins – “Dashing Alexandra!”

Grandma loved her siblings with self-abnegation, and above all her cousin Vera. She even got married because of her. Proposed by Granddad Vassili who was 25 years older, Grandma agreed at once, because Vera was marrying his brother. There were two weddings in one day. Grandma thought her and Verochka will never part!

They parted in 1924. Grandfather and his family had to abandon the estate, and having loaded 70 horse-driven carriages with household items, they headed towards Moscow. He resolved to organise a carriers' business. However, the entrepreneurial talent was lacking, nor was the time quite right for entrepreneurship. Business ended with NEP. Granddad got about for a year as a dvornik at the Union of Writers and was subsequently exiled form Moscow in view of his noble origin.

He did not survive these troubles. Grandma, forced to forget about the beautiful Amazon costume, worked daily shifts at the collective farm. Father was already at the time a student at the Ryazan' College of Arts, having already managed to be in the cast for the film “Ranks and people” directed by Yakov Protazanov. His part was the heroine's brother, a student who shed tears and pleaded to his father to stop drinking.

By chance I happened to watch that mute production on the telly, when I was already in my thirties. Father by that time had advanced in years way beyond sixty. I was struck by realisation that he virtually had not changed.

My other grandmother, on maternal side, lived in Balta. She was 17 when she met my grandfather. He proposed her with an open heart and was unequivocally rejected, being way too old for her (that is ten years older) and besides a widower raising a child. This went ostensibly out of line with my grandmother's idea of marriage. He found no better argument than to pull out his pistol and announce to her that if she insists in rejecting him, he would first shoot her and then himself. The fright convinced her and she agreed.

They lived a long and difficult, but overall happy life full of caring for each other.

Auguries

The war brought the German occupation of Odessa. Grandfather was locked up in a ghetto. Mother did not get locked up: she did not look Jewish and bore her first gentile husband's last name. They would hide Grandmother behind the wardrobe. They made living by needlework and tailoring and sent half of the proceeds to the Ghetto. Most of the family confined in the Ghetto perished, but Grandfather miraculously survived. When the war was over and he suddenly appeared in the doorway, Grandma did not recognise him. Only my mother, led by some inexplicable awareness, knew that was him – and threw her arms around his neck. But that was later. In wartime, women remain women and retain their clairvoyance.

An aged Bulgarian fortune-teller once told my Mom that her husband had died. “Calm yourself down. The war will end and you will have another husband. Everything will be all right. You will have two children: a boy first, and some three later years a girl. The boy should be kept away from water until one is 40.” So it happened. My childhood was marked by Mother's fear of water and the sea.

When I was 17, my friend and I took a “cultural” voyage to Leningrad. Peterhoff met us with desertedness and drizzle. On one of the alleys we ran into a gypsy. We oiled her palm with a rouble. She was palm-reading using a small looking-glass to double-check herself. Among usual banalities she repeated the Bulgarian's forecast – “Around forty you will be struck by a serious illness, but will survive.” She did not mention water. My youthful conscience in an act of defiance pushed the negative information away.

When I had plenty of time in the intensive care unit, it all came back to me. Everything took the form of a prophecy that was imparted to me, but in vain.

38 years old, in Odessa, the City by the Sea, in August, at half two at night I was hit by a car on an otherwise empty street.

The Gypsy also said – “Your second wife will beget you a daughter after you are 45.” That confused me. (It was not the claim that I will have more than one wife that sounded like a surprise.) “What about my first wife?” – I asked, following the invariable laws of logic. She spoke as if through me, fleetingly – “You'll have a son. He will become very ill. He will not live over the age of six.”

War

Father would say he never understood anything about that war. He was a private at the Leningrad front. A private's got to go where he is told to -- reconnaissance, night, crawling through the snow. They were spotted and fired at. Father got wounded. After spending some time in the hospital in the besieged city he was back at the frontline. During a battle he suddenly noticed that his leg got all soaked, and the trouser-leg was missing. He could not walk. Fortunately, an orderly galloping by stopped and Father's mates shouted to him to take Father to the infirmary. The orderly swore, but let my father take hold of the saddle-girth. He did not remember how they got there. Then he was being driven somewhere; there seemed no end to it. His leg was giving in to gangrene, and they wanted to amputate it. But the surgeon turned out to be a decent chap who thought that Father might still want to use his leg. The leg was spared, Father was decommissioned for good.

When I was a kid, Father and I would go to a public bath, and I would examine with admiration the scars on his thighs and mutilated rear.

– Have you ever fired at anyone, Dad?

– Yes, I have.

– Did you ever kill anyone?

– I doubt it…

Muddled paths

As a child I disliked drawing. There was neither a reason, nor an urge to do it. I did have a natural curiosity for what my parents were doing, but I have to say that the neighbour's – he was a lieutenant colonel – decorative dagger, with its black gilded sheath attracted me much more. The dagger had a button that one had to press in order to unsheathe it and a furrow running along the blade which was meant to serve, as I was told, a conduit for blood. How could that be beaten by jars with linseed oil that were paraded on the window-sill for bleaching in the sun, or by shrivelled oil-paint tubes? Never!