WELL AND TRULY LOST—this book I came across in childhood and kept for my own. A Russian primer, circa 1923, printed on stock so grainy it owed more to pumice than paper. Illustrations of earnest Russian schoolchildren—the girls with strictly braided hair and lavish bows—done in blurry ink that seemed to dissolve as I looked at them. The Byzantine elegance of those Cyrillic letters I loved like secrets, coded treasures, my tongue the key.
Vanished. It used to live in my study, not far from where my other Russian keepsake lies—a narrow brass pen tray, stamped with the tsar’s eagle and the date 1917. The kind of nibbed straight pen this tray deserves isn’t made anymore: the tray lies empty, flaunting its imperial impress in the face of a primer bearing an equal and opposite stamp. For though no Lenin in cloth cap and natty, spade-shaped beard strode through its pages, the very harshness of the paper and crudeness of the ink might have been singing the “Internationale” for a whole nation of soon-to-be-literate children.
For all I know, Marina Tsvetayeva’s daughter, the one who perished of starvation in a Moscow orphanage, might have learned to read from the pages of this primer, white ribbons like fat white ghosts pinching the ends of her braids. And that elderly, Russian-born woman I met by chance in Highgate so many years ago may have used this very book when she taught a schoolroom of peasant children in Sverdlosk, children so poor they came to school on alternate days, sharing the one pair of boots each family had between them. That schoolteacher went her own circuitous route from Tsarist to Soviet Russia and then, somehow, South Africa, to end up in a salubrious English suburb. But how did that primer come to be in Toronto, how did it make its way to my parents’ house, where books arrived like distinguished foreign visitors to be politely, anxiously put up? And where in the world is it now, this very moment, when I reach out for it?
A slender volume with cloth-covered boards—sober, grey cloth, factory-issue. An act of, an ode to, disintegration just to turn its ashy pages. Perhaps it hasn’t been borrowed from its shelf and never returned—perhaps it hasn’t—as I begin to fear—been thrown out in a fit of cleaning. Perhaps it hasn’t fallen behind the bookshelf-far-too-heavy-to-move, that limbo of printed matter, that forlorn lost-and-never-found. Perhaps it has slowly disappeared in situ over the years it’s been in my possession, turning phantom. But leaving what behind?
The ghost of two illustrations and two words. This is what I remember most clearly of the contents—two facing pages, on which appeared two pictures of the same boy, sitting at the same desk, with the same white cat who has jumped up to investigate whether fish might be swimming in the inkpot. The text is a two-word morality play. For in the first illustration—a mere line drawing—the boy is taking his straight pen and darting drops of blackest ink on the perfect blankness of the cat’s back. Cyrillic letters strut below: XA! XA! XA! The “X” is pronounced like the “ch” in the Scottish word “loch,” if you let yourself go to town, gutturally, with that “ch.” It is the very trumpet-call of Schadenfreude, that perverse joy discovered in the misery of others. What enchanted me about this illustration was its mate, on the facing page—a picture of the same cat knocking over the inkpot on the same boy’s copybook, making a beautiful black pool and provoking bitter lamentation, expressed by the reverse of those Cyrillic letters that appeared before: AX! AX! AX! Pronounced like the German “ach,” but with far more phlegm.
I must have known, even as a child, that justice didn’t work as concisely as this. I’ve learned, on growing up, that life is made out of complications, just as paper’s made out of a stew of pulp and rags. But I’ve kept the impress of these illustrations long after the book that sheltered them has vanished—I even begin to believe that my Russian primer has done its disappearing trick by distilling itself into those two words of text, exultation, grief and a whole world of puzzles and astonishments between.