XXXVI. MOSCOW

‘Be quiet! Quiet! Quiet right now!’

Giulia is standing on the stairs yelling at her sister. Delio is walking away, Julik is hiding behind a door, Genia is looking up at her punitively.

When Giulia is exhausted, when her thoughts are spinning through her head, when she is dizzy from accusations she would not be able to refute in one lifetime, and Delio wants something they don’t have, that doesn’t exist at all, she screams down the house.

All afternoon long he has been begging her sister for a wooden puppet that comes to life, over and over again, and Genia just pets his head and promises him the accursed thing which does not exist, not even in the best of all societies: the Soviet.

‘Tomorrow, we’ll bring you a piece of wood from the shed,’ Genia says, and Giulia screams: ‘Stop this nonsense!’ And to Delio: ‘Forget about the puppet! Wood is wood and doesn’t come to life!’

‘But in Kolja’s book—’

‘I don’t want to hear any more! Be quiet! Right now! All of you, just be quiet!’

But she is the only one yelling. The others look at her in silence. For months now, Giulia has been suffering from headaches, from screaming children and ever-more often from how inactive she is, how she is a superfluous piece of society that cannot contribute to growth, to construction, to the blossoming of the country, and even travelling to the countryside for a rest tomorrow will not change a thing, she knows that much, nothing will change, and she can barely endure it. She cannot do anything for anyone, not for her sons and not for her husband, and as soon as she goes to give Genia a hand, Genia admonishes her: ‘No, leave it alone, go and rest, you’ll just make a mess of things for me here.’ Sends her away if only to be close to her again later. Giulia and Genia—the mother pair, the duo, the informant and the censor—are always close to each other. Genia barely lets her out of her sight, as if she could run away like a naughty child, and now too, when Giulia finally takes a breath of air up there on the stairs, sits down, weakened by her outburst, Genia keeps a steady eye on her. Giulia’s mother, Grandma Schucht, simply stands there, shaking her head and murmuring: ‘Papa in prison and Mama making a fool of herself.’

As if Giulia didn’t know about his situation! She knows far too much: that he eats and sleeps far too little, that his health is poor even when he writes that he is doing better, by all means better, that he lies when it has to do with him though he always demands the truth and nothing but the truth from her and everyone else. She knows too much about everything but too little about how he is really doing. And then this silence that says more than she wants to hear, that says how right the newspapers are which have written that he is dying, that he may already be dead. She cannot think about it.

Of course Giulia is worried about Nino, but she cannot think about him all the time, it would drive her mad. And what can she do from here anyway? Nothing, she can only cause him more worry because, in addition to all the strain, she too is sick. For years she has been visiting psychoanalysts and doctors, the diagnoses could be strung together in a line and yet change very little. Crises, they say, psychophysical exhaustion.

In the mornings, sometimes, she thinks about Nino, the images of him are weak, she appears quite distant and hidden to herself and can only remember him through the photographs which have been exhibited in his honour in Gorky Park in Moscow, she needs these pictures as memory aids, she stands in front of them for a long time, looks at his face, oversized and intimidating, and then, heavy as nausea, memory rises up and she sees his face again at last, as only she had seen it, how it truly was outside of the photographs, nights in Silver Wood when he’d stick out his tongue at her, and in the flat in Rome when they’d bathe Delio and Nino would whisper: ‘We really have a handsome son.’

But what good are these thoughts of Nino? No good at all. She does not want to present the children with a weak man in chains, they should be proud of their father, they should see the way he looks down from a canvas in Gorky Park and the people admire him with his stormy hair and mild, but determined look, the small, round glasses, the thin wire across his nose, the slender lips . . . no one knows what he looks like now. ‘For years I have not looked in a mirror,’ Nino had written to her.

Giulia is so weak that yelling has made her more tired. She takes books from their library but leaves them on the table, unread. Soon she will not be able to stand up, she is nothing, nothing, nothing, there was only one time when she was something and that was when Nino was by her side, that great intellect which rubbed off on her a bit as well, which let her grow in its shadow.

She could endure twelve, fourteen hours at the typewriter when she sat in the office, and she held out because she thought that if she could not bring any important qualities into that new life, to the new country, then at least quantity might counter-balance it all. She was impractical, she was scattered, but she had always kept trying, over and over again . . . while Eugenia took away her Delio. And as listless and ineffective as she was, she had never been able to give her son anything either, nothing warm, nothing spontaneous. She could simply look on whenever Genia hoisted him up and he laughingly blew out air, and how bright his face grew when he saw her! But whenever Giulia holds him, his eyes seem a little sad. His skin is pale, and a few days ago he brought a letter home from school in which his teacher begged her to make sure there was more of a balance in Delio’s free time. ‘Whenever he writes something in class, he immediately tears it up and is nervous afterwards. He disturbs the other students.’

Giulia opens one of the books but notices how irritable she is, the lines seem abstruse and hostile, she tosses the book back onto the table and stands up. She slowly walks down the hall, up the stairs, remains standing out in front of the door to the children’s room. Delio is softly rocking Julik in his arms, they are playing father and son, as they often do.

‘Are we going tomorrow? We’re going to the countryside tomorrow, no?’ Delio asks. She nods but wants to cry, even though she doesn’t know why. She watches Delio run his hand across his brother’s head and how Julik snuggles up against him.

‘That’s good,’ Delio says. ‘I’ve promised Julik.’

Giulia wants to go to her room, to leave the children alone, but she is afraid for the young one. She’d once caught Delio biting his arm. With his back to her, without noticing she was standing behind him, he bit into his flesh over and over as if he’d gone wild. It yielded too little and only showed a reddish trace of teeth, no blood, and so again and again he bit himself as if punishing himself for something violent. He had bitten Giulia too, driven his small, dull milk teeth, lightning quick and hard, into her shoulder as she carried him, and she is afraid he could have one of these attacks when he’s with Julik.

Against Nino’s wishes, she had brought him to a specialist in Rome for nervous children. ‘Neuropathic,’ he had explained. ‘You must allow the child to run around, or he will not know what to do with all his energy.’ In Moscow, she took Delio to a psychiatrist who asked about his habits and peculiarities before having a look at his head, tapping his knee, his elbows, checking the speed of his eye movement, and finally giving him a series of brainteasers which, although he did not always answer correctly, he answered cleverly. ‘Bright,’ the psychiatrist said, ‘intelligent. It is incredible that parents like you could produce such a child,’ he observed, then scribbled something onto a piece of paper and turned back to Delio.

‘How many friends do you have?’

‘Three,’ Delio answered.

‘And what are their names?’

‘Sascha, Kolja and Oleg.’

‘And how many enemies do you have?’

‘Oh! A thousand!’

The doctor briefly looked at Giulia, who kept her head lowered. What was she supposed to say? She would have liked to apologize, but for what?

 

Finally, after a five-hour trip in which Delio grew steadily more restless and drummed his fists against the seat, they get out in front of the datscha. Here in the countryside, far from the city and its noise and the nervous masses of people, Delio is more relaxed. He runs off into the fields where, just like last year, he wants to catch frogs; and while Genia and Giulia are busy unpacking the suitcases, making tea and straightening up the terrace, Julik chases the cats and dogs around the front of the house. He keeps falling over, but always gets back up with a laugh and sings when he wanders after the chickens which flutter about in fright. They are not yet Young Pioneer songs, just syllables and sounds, but he too has grown taller. The son of an acquaintance is now using his baby bath, a newborn is sleeping in the old crib, the brother of one of Delio’s friends is in the perambulator and Julik always wants to play with one of the youngest children.

‘And I want a sister!’ he says to Giulia once he’s back from his forays.

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Later.’

He sits on one of the small children’s stools and whistles dreamily. Giulia likes to hear him, perhaps one day he will study at the conservatory, or become a carriage driver, for he likes horses and gets excited whenever they trot past the terrace pulling a light wagon full of people. They all look happy, certainly happier than the people in this house.

Genia brings out some tea, sits next to her sister and looks at her, just like she has for years.

‘Giulia, you don’t eat enough. You could stand to gain 10 kilos, and, if you don’t manage during the summer out here in the country, you certainly won’t in the city.’

Giulia nods. She will not be able to manage this either. She needs so many doctors, so many diagnoses. Earlier, she didn’t want to get healthy at all. She went for cures in order to break them off. After all, the doctors had long considered her an epi-leptic; only recently did a female doctor certify her as hysterical. In Sevastopol, a doctor found her hysterical-epileptic. ‘How is it that all the other doctors until now have failed to give me this diagnosis?’ she had asked. ‘Well, doctors do not like to give out a diagnosis like this too much,’ he had answered casually. ‘Because the illness does not really exist. But Gogol and Dostoevsky both suffered from it. You are in great company.’

So, with hysteria too she has top-ranking comrades-in-suffering. In the Gospels, there were cases, her new doctor had explained, which were very similar to hers, and Napoleon was hysterical too. ‘Big names, Ms Schucht.’

‘Well, my own name is enough for me.’

Delio walks up to her, completely soaked. He used his shoes to go fishing, he says, but was unable to catch anything except a couple of small, fidgety things. He hands Genia his shoe, then Giulia is allowed to have a look at what is swimming around in the leather pool: a few tadpoles.

‘You must not go into the water with all your clothes,’ Genia admonishes him and runs a hand through his wet hair.

‘But, Mama, that doesn’t matter, I won’t let the current wash away my shoes.’

‘But have a look at the leather. We’ll put the water in a jug and stick the shoes out in the sun. Do you think they’re a good net?’

‘Djadja said that in Sardinia they catch fish with hollowed-out stones. Shoes are much more practical, they’ve already been hollowed out and they’re lighter too.’

Genia sends the boy into the house, she will dry him off with a towel once he’s in his bedroom, and put him in to dry clothes. Genia follows him without compliant and Giulia hears her ask: ‘And what fish do you want me to catch you tomorrow?’

‘Since when has he been so interested in fish?’ Giulia asks her sister once she is back out on the veranda.

‘You’re surprised? When Antonio writes such crazy stuff? I don’t think reading Antonio’s letters out loud to him is a good idea.’

‘But he is their father.’

‘What a father! Does he make any effort to help? He goads you on, he reprimands you, everything revolves around him. And he is incapable of loving. Where do all your crises come from? As if you didn’t know yourself. Do you want things to go the same way for Delio?’

Giulia could scream into her sister’s face that the way she raises her children—as well as her relationship with Nino—is none of her business. ‘Be aggressive when necessary,’ her female doctor had told her. ‘Be unfair. That is essential for your recovery.’ But though Giulia’s throat may throb with rage, in the end Eugenia will be proven right.

‘I did not want to tell him that the letters come from prison,’ Giulia answers flatly.

‘That is not the point. Antonio has never understood how to be a loving father. He is a cold man. He lives in his thoughts. He is not good for the children.’

Giulia knows that it’s not like that. Or she thought she did. For a while she was certain that Nino wanted to be close to the children, for he wrote her so. He wanted to know how they were developing, how tall they were, whether they got enough to eat and were gaining weight. But could Genia be right? His letters are terribly pedantic, he reproaches Julik for writing so fleetingly and criticizes Delio for not thinking rigorously enough. But they are just kids.

Once they are back in the city, she will look for all the old articles and photographs of Nino that she’s collected. She will read Delio what others have written about Nino as opposed to what’s been said in this family, where everyone’s personal opinion is the only one and any other is censored.

Delio should get to see his father as he was, an active fighter for the Revolution, for communism, who was now in prison, but not for having done anything wrong; on the contrary, for having too many good things, because he had hesitated to leave Italy, because he had only wanted to leave when it was clear and unmistakable to every worker that the situation in the country was forcing him to go. He did not want to leave them in the lurch, he did not want them to feel as if he was leaving them in the lurch, and Delio should know this so that he does not have the need to hide from reality, like she did.

Delio comes back out, his cheeks seem redder than normal, perhaps his spell in the creek had really been good for him.

‘Were you alive when Pushkin was alive?’ he asks, and finally cuddles up to his Mama-Giulia.

She laughs, puts an arm around him. ‘No, I wasn’t even a thought back then.’

‘Was Grandmother alive? And what about when the Montgolfiers were alive?’

‘No, she wasn’t either.’

‘But how can that be? Who was?’

‘A lot of things happened before the oldest person that you know was even born. But you’re lucky, they were not good times. Back then, the few told the many not to want anything and not to think anything and simply to serve. And the many had no idea that they could fight back, that it was, that it is, possible to change society. You are lucky to have been born in a very good time indeed.’

‘How much time will it be before a child is born for whom I will be as old as Djadja is now? Before I,’ he calculates and opens his eyes wide in shock, ‘before I am a forty-year-old?’

‘Not that long, dear. Not long enough for everything to change again. In any event, that won’t happen any longer, there’s no reason to be afraid,’ Giulia says and strokes his cheek. It feels like a puppet. Something completely foreign. Delio pushes away from her: ‘Leave me alone, leave me alone!’ he cries and kicks the table. Giulia jumps up in order to catch the tableware, and Delio is already hanging on to her arm. And biting into her. And biting again as if his very life depended on it.