9
A cold, icy wind blew towards us at Moscow Airport, as we followed our taxi driver across a large car park to his vehicle. ‘For me, visiting Russia is like what a visit to Auschwitz must be for Jews,’ my father told me, on the way to the hotel where a travel agency in Budapest had talked him into booking us: a grey tower building with a shopping arcade in front of it. The shops were either closed or hadn’t even opened yet. We got out of the taxi, I pulled my father’s wheeled suitcase through black puddles of rain outside the entrance, and joined the cluster of people at the reception desk, all of them brandishing their passports. There was a small bar in the lobby, and I had taken my father there so that he could rest from the flight, from his first impressions–yes, from what, really? I wanted to spare us a wait with Uzbek businessmen and truck drivers from Astana to collect the key to our room. I looked at him drinking his beer, an elderly gentleman in a grey winter jacket buttoned up to the neck, and his new shoes with their fake fur lining on view. He did not look at the TV set, or the other hotel guests hurrying past him. Nor was he interested in the brochures lying on the counter, all those shashlik restaurants in the vicinity, gaming casinos, striptease clubs–all he wanted to do was sit there. I don’t know anyone else who can sit motionless for so long, staring straight ahead of him. A thought came into my mind that often used to pass before my inner eye in my youth, as if on a red LED ticker display: make sure he’s all right. Only I never knew how to go about it.
How are you? I typed into my phone. We were less than twenty metres apart. I waited until the text reached him, and he jumped slightly because his mobile was vibrating. Where was it, inside his clothing, outside him? In the pocket of his trousers. He took his glasses off to read the message. I saw him writing back, his forefinger on the little display. I knew what the answer would be; it was an old joke between us. Every family has its code, and ours was: not too bad.
Not too bad, that used to be our reply to all kinds of questions. Everything was ‘not too bad’. School, a meal, our moods. Have you had a good day? Not too bad. How was the tennis match? Not too bad, and how about you at the office? Nothing was ever really good; misfortune always threatened, and even if the sun happened to be shining, dark clouds would soon be sure to gather in the sky. My father would never have hyped anything, or made out that it was better than it was. There was a touch of loss and defeat about everything in my childhood, as if it might all fall apart at any time.
When we finally entered our room on the fourteenth floor, it was dark outside. I stood at the window and saw individual lights all the way to the horizon, with many black spaces between them. A small wood, maybe, or a park, probably also the graveyards of defunct cars, waste land, half-finished apartment blocks with iron rods sticking up into the air. ‘There’s a form of ugliness that I find attractive,’ I said to my father, sounding like a student of architecture in his third semester, but I wanted to bridge the damn silence. ‘Just as there are cities renowned for their beauty that put me off because they’re too cute, if you see what I mean.’ That sounded even worse; had I really said ‘cute’? And because he didn’t answer, I looked at him. He was lying on the bed, but not asleep. He hadn’t even taken his jacket off, but his glasses were lying on the bedside table. Without them, he looked a different person.
My grandfather spent ten years in Russian captivity. From 1945 to 1955. The file on him at that time runs to almost a hundred pages. It had been lying in the military archives for sixty years by the time I found it, and had it photocopied and translated. There are two photographs in it, showing my grandfather as I have never seen him. One was taken soon after his arrest; it shows him at the age of thirty, wearing the kind of clothes favoured today by young hippies at organic markets in Brooklyn, Berlin and Zürich: a loose-knit pullover with a lumberjack’s shirt under it; a dark jacket; brown, calf-length lace-up boots. He looks healthy, has a light stubble, a high forehead, and not a trace of despair in his eyes, which are so like mine.
The second photograph dates from 1955, ten years later, and was taken in Camp 84, in a town called Asbest in the Ural mountains of Western Siberia. One Major Simanovsky had caught my grandfather breaking the camp rules. As reported on 1.4.1955: ‘The convict Batthyány put his hand through the wire fence and tried to give Prisoner T., in solitary confinement at the time, black bread with butter and sausage, 100 grams of sugar, and four cigarettes.’
Simanovsky wrote that he proposed seven days imprisonment for this offence. But my grandfather complained of fever and pain in the region of the kidneys. Simanovsky, a very conscientious guard, went to the trouble of checking his temperature. ‘I make it only 37.3 degrees. He seems to be faking ill health,’ I read aloud to my father in our hotel room, but he did not react. Was he asleep after all? Was he cursing himself, and wishing he were at home? I went on: ‘His state of health will stand up to a week’s imprisonment.’ Simanovsky locked my grandfather up on 2 April, and let him out again on 9 April.
I wonder what became of Simanovsky? A faithful Soviet citizen, with Marx and Lenin on his bookshelves? Later on a civil servant, a member of the Communist Party, and by the time Gorbachev came along, was he a senior citizen in a knitted cardigan with leather elbow patches, and a little dacha out in the country? Did he think of all the prisoners he had guarded while he whipped his back with a birch twig in the sauna at weekends?
Or maybe it was the other way around, and the years at the camp turned him against the regime. Marx and Lenin were banished to the cellar; instead he read Solzhenitsyn and the first political writings of Václav Havel, whom he secretly admired. Later he handed out leaflets and, when Gorbachev talked about perestroika, went out into the streets to rejoice. Did he remember all those prisoners while he listened to the slow movement of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6, the Pathétique?
How many of those people are still around? I mean people like Simanovsky. They were young during the war, and in the eighties, when I was growing up, they were senior citizens with flat caps, age spots on their faces, and glasses with the sort of lenses that progressively darken in sunlight. All over Europe they fed pigeons, sat in the shade of large plane trees in parks, and patted the heads of strangers’ babies in their prams. Forty years before, they had been guards, soldiers, secret policemen, informers, they had conducted interrogations, had tortured and murdered people, handed out severe sentences, and wrote up the records, just as Simanovsky wrote up my grandfather’s. The photo taken of him in 1955, when he was imprisoned, no longer shows a hippy, but the kind of camp inmates we know from Spielberg films: head shaven, a few teeth missing, eyes dead. Without a word, I handed the photo to my father; we were both lying on our beds now. He held the picture so close to his eyes that the tip of his nose touched it, and it fluttered when he breathed out.
‘What a miserable shit,’ he said as I googled the name Simanovsky. Over 10,000 hits, among then a supplier of drinks near Red Square.
‘Shall we go and have a drink?’ I asked.
‘At this time of night?’
‘We’re in Moscow, although it doesn’t look like it from up here. There must be people somewhere, restaurants, cafés.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘No. All the same, I’m going down to Skype the children; I’ll get better reception there.’
‘They’ll ask how Grandpa is–what do I say?’
‘Say I’m not too bad.’
There were still dozens of people in the lobby; it would be like that all night. Russia is a country with eleven time zones, so people are arriving all round the clock to visit family or do business. I switched on my computer and, a little later, saw my wife and children crowding in front of the screen and all talking at once, so that I could hardly make anything out.
‘Is there pasta in Russia too, Papa?’ they asked.
‘Has Grandpa seen a polar bear?’
At home I had told them how cold it is in Siberia, and they asked, ‘As cold as where the polar bears live?’ After a few minutes my wife sent the children away. ‘Let me have a word too,’ I heard her saying, and saw wobbly pictures. A knee? Hair? Then her voice. ‘Off you go to your room now!’ More shouting, and a door latching.
‘Here I am,’ she said. ‘How’s Moscow?’
‘We haven’t seen much of it. It’s raining, and I don’t have any warm shoes.’
‘You should buy some, then.’
‘Yes, I know.’
‘How are things between you and your father?’
I felt like saying, ‘Not too bad,’ because it was exactly right, but instead I told her how depressed he seemed to be. ‘Tired all the time,’ I said, ‘and taking no interest in anything. Am I like that myself?’
‘Like what?’
‘So withdrawn.’
‘Give him a few more days,’ she advised me, and I nodded.
‘How are the children?’
‘Complaining of sore throats.’
‘It’s not that bad.’
‘Okay,’ I said.
‘Okay,’ she replied. In the background I saw our living room, the green armchairs, the bookcase that we had discussed for ages before buying it. On the floor were the two rubber dinosaurs that we always trod on when one of the children had a bad dream at night, or was thirsty, and we had to get up to calm them down. One of the dinosaurs had wings and sharp teeth, the other a long, yellow neck. They were hardly recognizable on the screen, but I knew it was them. They belonged to our world.
‘Look after yourself,’ said my wife.
‘I’ll call from Siberia,’ I replied, thinking that sounded good. A click, and she was gone.