Five Essays

Cross My Heart

In August 2015 I was in Kharkiv making a film with some Ukrainian colleagues about army psychologists and their patients. We had tracked down the psychologists and found three patients—a wounded fighter, a former prisoner of war and a woman refugee from the Donbass—who were willing to talk on camera. All we needed then was three or four minutes of front-line city atmosphere for background.

Kharkiv lives parallel lives: summertime easy living and a barely discernible war. More than 100,000 refugees try to remain invisible, though the queues for handouts are plainly to be seen. In a little more than a year the army hospital “processed” more than 10,000 soldiers. Many of them did not go back home or to the front, but were returned to the cemeteries of their towns and villages. This zone of misfortune, physical suffering and agony behind barrack walls, is off limits to film crews. The director of the film, Lidia Starodubtseva, and I went into the hospital with a concealed camera to interview the fighter. Otherwise we couldn’t have got in. We brought him fruit and juice as a cover, while secretly filming the rows of crutches and empty wheelchairs lining the corridors, the silhouettes of patients smoking in the yard.

Culture in wartime is in a kind of no-man’s-land. It pokes about furtively in other people’s wounds. One of the medics told us how he was in a truck with his unit when they came under fire. It was winter. The medic was in luck. He came out of it without a scratch. But his head and feet were so frozen, his teeth were chattering. Suddenly he felt his chest go hot. He looked down at his combat jacket and saw he was hot from the blood of a dead comrade. This story scorched my memory. I recalled some lines the Soviet front-line poet Iona Degen wrote in 1944:

My comrade, in your death agony

Do not call on your friends in vain.

Better I warm my hands

Over your steaming blood.

In wartime, culture can’t help but warm its hands over the misfortune of others. But it has a justification for doing so. Images of death, despair, grief registered by a poet, composer, artist, can postpone new wars, yes, postpone, but not prevent.

Bibliothika

My grandfather called the library on our estate his “bibliothika”, my father referred to his “collection of books”. I liked putting my cheek against his and listening to his voice. It didn’t matter what he read, Mother Goose, Les veillées du château, Robinson Crusoe or The Iliad, as long as it was him reading, and reading to me.

But I say unto you, and what is said will soon come to pass …

Sometimes I made so bold as to tweak the tassel on his skullcap or secretly finger one of his braided button-loops. My father would frown and by a slight change in intonation let me understand he disapproved. When he left me alone with the encyclopedias of the heavens, ABCs, incunabula, bedtime storybooks, I would lose all sense of time and meander through the maze of books until my tutor forcibly removed me to the nursery.

My secret dream was to lock myself away in the library forever. Even the furniture seemed to be out of a fairy tale: a French mahogany armchair with arms carved in the shape of a sphinx; a little stool on wheels so you could scuttle along in front of the shelves; a walnut bureau; a lacquered rosewood secretaire with bronze handles on each of a myriad of little drawers and cubbyholes, a key with a ribbon and a hidden spring that opened a tiny secret compartment.

Left to my own devices in the hall on the lower floor, I liked spinning a round table with little S-shaped feet and was once careless enough to send an ormolu clock, candelabra and bronze urn crashing to the floor. For this misdemeanour I was made to kneel in the corner and deprived of all treats.

Later I realised the reason our library was so richly endowed with French books and furnishings was because my father was worried about a repeat of Emperor Pavel’s persecution of all things foreign, including fashions of dresses and hats, and nouns with a French revolutionary tinge such as citizen, patriot, nation. But I understood this only after the passage of time, when the word bibliothika had definitely outlived its time and reverted irrevocably into dust.

No, I was not of aristocratic descent. There was no library creaking and rustling on the floor below, no Black Forest cuckoo clock, no lacquered secretaire reminded in its dreams of a carefree childhood growing wild in a far-off kingdom called Peru. But there were two glass-fronted bookcases in the cramped government apartment in which the brown volumes of the Selected Works of V.I. Lenin cohabited peacefully with pre-revolutionary editions of Hobbes, Herbert Spencer and Heine, which my father, a Soviet journalist and indefatigable bookworm, had picked up second-hand.

I had to leave the most valuable of them behind when I emigrated at the end of the 1970s. Emigrants could only take out Soviet editions published before 1946. Once in Germany and Britain my collection of Russian and Soviet poets was supplemented by hundreds of forbidden books published abroad, so-called “samizdat”. Back home their ownership would have cost me a lifetime in the camps. Familiarising myself with this forbidden fruit was effortless, as if I’d already read them when I was young.

The idea of a “cottage library” does not strike me as being pathetic and demeaning. Cottage libraries sprang up in Russia in the nineteenth century and it was only later they became associated with Soviet mass literacy campaigns. But the historical associations are not the point. For me the words cottage and log cabin have the breath of pine needles and resin. Books are also made from lumber. It is processed with saws, chippers, bark strippers. And so paper also endures its birth pangs, emerging smooth and fragile if made from hardwoods such as oak or maple, rough and strong if from softwoods like spruce or fir. At the very least, I find the meeting of books and wood in a cottage library natural and even touching. Books are intelligent and sensitive beings, they respond to the call of family.

I do not remember at which move from one country to another my quiet hatred for my library began. Packing it up into unwieldy cardboard boxes. Then the unpacking. Placing the books on shelves in order of genre, language, size. And then packing up again after a few years. Will they really keep pursuing me to the boards of my coffin and even beyond? Serves them right: let them rot alongside my mortal remains. Meantime I will read poetry, prose and essays “into holes” on my computer and occasionally leaf through the books signed by my author friends, books which I will always find in the library of my mind.

Terroir

You only remember you’re white if you’re in Africa, or you’re a man when you’re next to a woman you find attractive. It’s the sideways looks and the prohibitions that make you aware of nationality. In the twenty-first century it is ever harder to preserve the “I”, to remain yourself. Put homogenised egos in a crowd and they may buck and squirm a bit, but they will, in the end, surrender.

Over the years I have attended a number of Caribbean carnivals in London. No more than a few hundred spectators were at the first one. The most recent, at the end of August 2015, drew more than a million. A reveller puts on a carnival mask and does things for which he bears no responsibility. The London West Indians lose all sense of decorum. They beat the living daylights out of steel drums, dance like demons, wear skintight costumes that leave nothing to the imagination, guzzle tons of spicy food and hot sauces. For three days blacks exact revenge on a city of albinos with a strong case of vitamin deficiency. London makes no attempt to fight back. For London the Notting Hill Carnival is a hot sauce, a vindaloo, a Jamaica pepper. The memory of the carnival keeps London going for a year. Without it life in the capital would truly be as dull as ditchwater.

But what is a European paleface to do in London? The French have a word, terre. The primary meaning is earth. From this word grew a great concept, a whole image: terroir, used by tea blenders, cheese-makers, baristas, connoisseurs of olives and, first and foremost, by vintners. The image encompasses the rising and setting of the sun, snow and rain, landscape and soil, forests and scrub, wild winds and gentle breezes, rivers and lakes, fauna and flora. An experienced palate can tell the soil a vine grows in: flinty for a white Loire Sancerre, pebbly clay in a Pomerol Merlot, Rhone Valley quartzite in a Châteauneuf-du-Pape.

Man is the only thing excluded in terroir: he is too intellectual, civilised, unnatural. Yes, man does have his terroir, in no way inferior to nature. Man is also a product of terroir, but the produce is richer, more complex, more surprising than even the finest of wines. Then add to all the natural phenomena such things as emotions, transient as clouds, the nooks and crannies of memory, heartfelt passions, solitary conversations with God, the inhalations and exhalations of inspiration. I see no need to add terroir as an entry in one’s passport, though. There are more important documents in life, and nobody has the authority to take away what each of us has been given from birth.

Under-Age Juveniles

There was a time when one of the city’s parks was the M.I. Kalinin Park of Culture and Leisure. Now it’s changed to T.G. Shevchenko Park. The city in western Ukraine is still called Chernivtsy, though several other variants feature as footnotes to its biography. I remember the park well. I was around twelve or thirteen when Malagamba brought his jazz orchestra to Chernivtsy. The band came from Romania. Moscow had already been graced by the likes of Van Cliburn, Yves Montand and Yma Sumac, but for Chernivtsy the outside world meant Malagamba. At home he was considered Romania’s all-time top percussionist, while for Chernivtsy he was the world’s greatest. Along with all the other local lads I tried to scale the park’s high fence to catch the weird and wonderful beat. The planks were nailed tight, so we stood on each other’s shoulders, craning our necks for a momentary glimpse of Malagamba pounding away. They wouldn’t let us inside: there was still an aeon to go before we turned sixteen.

I recalled these concerts at a recent poetry festival in Chernivtsy. I had been asked to say a few words to the poets from various countries staying in a hotel opposite the park, and I shared my childhood memories. Afterwards a Romanian poet came over and told me his father had also been a Malagamba fan. For a week there were readings in half a dozen languages and even dialects like Hutsul, Schweizerdeutsch, Boarisch. But Malagamba kept resurfacing in my mind.

Back then, in the late 1950s, early 1960s, it wasn’t just children, the whole Soviet Union was under sixteen. Soviets weren’t let in, admitted, or allowed out. Perestroika was an eternity away. The entire country was craning its neck to catch the merest glimpse of what was happening beyond the Iron Curtain. Sometimes you managed not just to see, but also to hear. Jazz was for me what chalk is for children with calcium deficiency. It was a fuzzy echo of freedom. It was and remained so. Even here in Prague, in the twenty-first century, I wrote a poem about it:

You can call it

“a runaway slave”.

At night he creeps out of hiding,

pats the dogs as he passes.

Goes down to the river, and ducking

so the water comes above his shoulders,

wades upstream.

His running is laboured, focused.

Flares hiss in his wake

and lick at his heels.

He’s heading North, to Tennessee.

During daylight he will sleep,

head North again once it’s dark.

What’s this about?

Right.

           Improvised jazz.

Memories of Summer

I was five when my parents brought me from Siberia to Chernivtsy. At that age it’s feelings that count, not the names of countries and still less words. I can still remember the move from a world of the colour-blind to a world that displayed the full spectrum, the joy of the sensations, a cascade of pippin flower, a storm of vines, a flush of apricot. You could say it could just as well have been Abkhazia or Turkey. Yes, it could, but it happened to be Bukovina in western Ukraine.

I was ten and in third grade. It was a Ukrainian literature lesson and I was called up to the blackboard. But the bell rang. Three days in a row I’d prepared: read a short text and done a precis. It had, in fact, happened three days earlier. I’d read a text, done a precis, but was given only nine out of ten. I went back to my desk and burst into tears. It wasn’t because of the mark. I wept from impotence: this language so close to my own, this foreign language was beyond me. It was a living thing. It was only later I understood how I should take it: by love. Ten years later the poet David Samoilov told me: “I’m translating Mykola Bazhan, I don’t understand a word of it, but it seems to me as though I know Ukrainian.”

Mandelstam once remarked on the “Hellenistic nature” of the Russian language, while Nabokov noted the amazing capacity of Russian to convey landscape, the languor of trees, smells, rains, all things in a way that is humanly tender, and also earthy, rough, lasciviously juicy. Both poets, I think, had in mind that the gap between the sound and meaning of Russian words pushes for zero. In this sense Ukrainian is even more “Hellenistic” than Russian. Krykhkiy, rynva, zelenkuvatiy, pralya, karkolomniy, those are words carved not of sound, but of solid matter.

I first—school doesn’t count—spoke Ukrainian in emigration. It turns out that young Ukrainians who had grown up in America or England didn’t know Russian. That’s the truth, it’s not some figment of my imagination or ideological bullshit. Maybe the current generation of young Ukrainians will also have a poor knowledge of Russian. It pains me to think it might be so. But I have a vested interest, I am a writer and I want to reach as many readers as possible. All right, let them read me in translation.

I did not begrudge those Hutsul children I taught English and Russian to a quarter of a century ago in the Carpathians. In the evenings I used to patrol the low dormitory block where my pupils slept. Along the corridor on the ground floor were long rows of children’s boots, shoes, galoshes, sandals. Why sandals, when it was already autumn? Shoes with the leather worn to white, tattered shoelaces that were all knots, a fusty smell of leather, sweat, damp. Just you try looking at those boots, shoes, galoshes, sandals—but why sandals, when it was already autumn?—and not sag against the banister, not burst into tears …

Translator’s notes: Mykola Bazhan, Ukrainian poet, member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, People’s Deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR and of the Supreme Rada of the Ukrainian SSR, nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature but forced to reject the nomination. Krykhkiy, rynva, zelenkuvatiy, pralya and karkolomniy are Ukrainian for fragile, water main, greenish, washerwoman and breakneck.