Chapter 6

I’m making Grandma out like she was a villain, but perhaps she was nothing of the kind. The thing is that I only knew her from Dad’s stories. In my retelling, he probably comes off like a monster too. He didn’t know how to be with her: behind her back, he called her a witch, but when he was by her, especially after the stroke confined her to her bed, he was tender. He was far gentler to her than to my mother.

One dictator died, and a second, after that a third came along, and then it was the Thaw. The country was changing, walls went up, walls came down, wars were lost and won, people were dispatched to space, Siberia and graves. I’m rushing here, I want to get to Mum. Nineteen eighty-six was a big year. Dad turned fifty. “Five decades, Evochka! Life has flown by, and I barely noticed.” On July 3, his birthday, he finished a book of stories—you and I should cook breakfast with it tomorrow—and he bought a ticket to Moscow. That was an act of uncommon resolve for a man who had been no further than the limits of the Donetsk province. He hoped to circulate among the progressives and intellectuals in the capital, not those “mediocrities” who had made fun of him all those years.

Now they’ll know what he’s worth.

Nobody published the book, naturally. No publisher even deigned to respond or offer notes. What he did get was an impassioned letter to his cheap room in the Sputnik Hotel, which he’d put down as his return address, from an unnamed woman, his first and last admirer: my mother.

By some lucky chance (for me), she worked at one of the publishing houses to which he had submitted his manuscript. She dealt with correspondence and sometimes read manuscripts. She was twenty years his junior, of that generation of Soviet intellectuals that had grown up on Brodsky’s poetry, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones, that had read samizdat copies of Kafka and Orwell—they were still all banned and beloved.

They met, went to a restaurant, held each other’s hands. He had no idea how to behave around her and didn’t even try kissing her on their first date. That disappointed her and made him even more alluring. He wondered: “A beautiful young woman who likes my work? How is that possible?” Nothing had prepared him for this. Mum told me how they went for walks around Moscow, ate ice-cream, drank pop, talked about books. He read little foreign literature, but he had an intuitive sense for the plots and narrative devices she found so exciting. And Platonov, of course he read Platonov, his favourite writer. That was the clincher for Mum. It was love. He pouted, got angry even, when she likened him to Borges, but the unhappiness and moodiness would pass, giving way to relief and inspiration. He learned anew how to live and raised his head (“Well have you at least read Zamyatin? No?” She still used the formal “you” at that stage). She reminisced fondly of those days. “You inspire me. When I’m with you, it’s as though I’ve woken from a deep slumber,” he said to her. It was the warmest thing he’d ever said. After they had spent three nights at the Sputnik together, he wrote “Roadside Hotel,” “Layer City,” and a bunch of farewell letters to Grandma that he never got around to sending.