By the time Galina left the Soviet Union, the story of her mother’s family had been told and retold. She had stored it in the safest chamber of memory, where it lay with a strange and quiet volatility. Through the many retellings, her mother’s history, so powerful and vivid, had become her history: the threat of those times, the fear, the terrible loss of a mother and a father, the shocking betrayal of a son and brother. And she, too, had come to hate Mikhail.

The story had expanded since Galina had come to Australia with all she had read about Soviet Russia. She’d been appalled to learn what the great revolution had cost the Russian people — the deliberate starvation of entire communities, the millions of deaths, the lies of the leaders. It was like suddenly discovering that a parent or a sibling, someone very close to you, was a vicious killer. And even if only a fraction of the claims were true, Soviet society had been, and probably remained, monstrously cruel, and Soviet leaders possessed of as little regard for its citizens as the wind had for the clouds it pushed around. She used to believe that in order to remain sane in a repressive regime, memory was forced to discard what it simply could not bear to hold. But the fact was, her own mother and people like her did not forget. Perhaps forgetting was the exclusive prerogative of the perpetrators, providing them with a well-oiled gateway to a guiltless future.

Here in sunny Melbourne, Galina saw happy faces and carefree children; there was freedom and opportunity in this country, but most of all there was an absence of fear. Yet she was all too aware that she, a Russian Jew, was formed by Russia — the Russia of her lifetime and the earlier Russia of her mother and grandparents. She might well be surrounded by freedom and delight, but she carried her past with her. It was as if she were inhabiting two lives simultaneously, and much of the time they were not an easy fit.

To know her past was to go some way to knowing her, so perhaps it would help if she were to share it with some Australians. Andrew perhaps. Take him back as a guest through the Brezhnev years to Khrushchev and her own birth, back to Stalin, the war, the terror, the revolution, back to the beginning. This, she might say to him, this is how I came to be who I am. She considered this only for a moment before letting it go. She suspected that to speak in Australia of her past was as impossible as it had been in the Soviet Union.

7 LANDMARKS OF A LIFE

7

LANDMARKS OF A LIFE

A few days after their trip to Victoria Market, Andrew telephoned Galina — not to arrange a visit to his studio as she had expected, but to invite her to his parents’ place for dinner.