Calligraphy Lesson: The Collected Stories

Of Saucepans and Star-Showers

All winter long I fantasized about spending the summer in Valais and roaming the mountains every day. I pored over the map and plotted out various routes. I’d be mountain-bound bright and early and homeward-bound come evening, tired and happy after a full day’s ramble.

But then summer came, and I landed up in hospital with a bilateral hernia. There was no escaping postoperative complications, either—inflammation, high fever, antibiotics. As soon as my stitches were out I went off to Brentschen. But I had to kiss goodbye to all my wonderful plans. No hours-long hikes in the mountains. The first few days I ventured only as far as the table on the lawn in front of the chalet. I gazed at the Weisshorn and rejoiced at life.

The mountains in this vicinity have inspired so many descriptions that they seemed like quotations emerging suddenly from beyond the clouds.

I thought, too, about how, as the years go by, taking genuine delight in something becomes possible only when you can share that delight with somebody else. My son had promised to come and visit for a couple of days, and, watching the Rhône valley change colour in the twilight, almost as if it were pulling on a lilac stocking, I so wished I could enjoy this spectacle in his company rather than alone.

But he could never seem to find the time to come.

As I waited for his visit, I gradually started getting out and about, venturing further and further from the village each day, now taking the level road towards Jeizinen, now the mountain track in the direction of Leukerbad, and every time I imagined how we’d stroll around these parts together. I walked at a leisurely pace, often stopping. The stitches itched unbearably—I wanted to pick the plaster off and tear at the scars with my nails.

Then my son emailed to let me know he was already on his way. His short message ended with the following riddle: imagine a saucepan big enough to hold anything you like—a chicken, a whole bull, a house, the entire Earth, even the entire universe. Yet what can such a saucepan never hold?

Let me explain. The thing is, his mother and I divorced when he was seven. I became a pop-in father. And, later, a fly-in father. Things were probably better that way, for everybody and for him first and foremost. When his mother and I fought—undignifiedly, inanely, smashing crockery and slamming doors—he didn’t cry, just threw himself now at her, now at me, his hands clenched into little fists. Living like this was impossible. My leaving home did us—my son and myself—a world of good. Had we continued to live together, I would have only shouted at him: put your shoes away! Or, Do your homework! Or, Stop badgering me, can’t you see I’m writing! But because I’d left, our get-togethers throughout his childhood were about him and for him only, and I never told him to stop badgering me. Not a single time. It was worth leaving home for that alone.

In periods away from one another we’d exchange letters. About anything and everything. I thought up various charades for him, crosswords, riddles. In each letter he’d pose tricky questions of his own, such as: If steam is lighter than water, then why is ice not heavier than water, but lighter?

He’s all grown-up now, but he still rounded off that email with one of his riddles.

He’s twenty-three now, an adult.

By the age of sixteen I already knew everything about myself. I knew what I wanted from this life: to write books and to travel. And I knew that this was impossible. Because I was born into a country where whatever I might write would never be published, and beyond whose borders I would never be allowed to travel. This was a slave-country, and my slave-parents had birthed me into bondage. I knew exactly what I wanted, but it was all impossible—and I felt like a disconsolate wretch.

My son, in contrast, has it all within his grasp: he’s already travelled half the world, he writes, makes films, gives concerts of his own music. But he still doesn’t truly know what he wants from this life. Which makes him feel wretched, too.

Happiness, most likely, is conditional neither on liberty nor on its lack.

There I was, strolling along the track in the direction of Leukerbad, the air laden with the sharp aromas of the warm sunlit forest, of pine resin and wild strawberries, and I pondered what it was that wouldn’t fit into a saucepan big enough to hold the Milky Way, all the galaxies, and the entire universe from beginning to end?

And then I encountered my father. He was walking towards me, a rucksack on his shoulders, sturdy mountain boots on his feet, sun-bronzed, healthy, young. This was my father, but not as I knew him in his final years, a grey-haired, gnarly guzzler. This was the father I remembered from my childhood. I stopped, astounded, while he strode over to me, nimbly and vigorously, as does a weary traveler at the conclusion of a whole day spent on mountain paths, with the end of a long, splendid hike finally in sight.

Drawing level with me, he smiled and said, “Grüezi!”

“Grüezi!” I replied.

And he strode on towards Brentschen.

The fact that my father had spoken to me in Swiss German brought me back to reality. Needless to say, this young man, many years my junior, could not be my father, delivered to the flames of a Moscow crematorium in his sailor’s uniform seventeen years previously.

During the war my father had been a submariner in the Baltic, and a photograph of his Shchuka hung on our wall. That Daddy had a submarine was a source of great pride for me as a child, and I’d constantly be making drawings of the photo in my school exercise book, carefully inscribing the number Shch-310 on the submarine’s nose. Every ninth of May—Victory Day—my father would get out his sailor’s uniform, which he was always having altered to accommodate his ever-growing belly, and pinned on all his badges. Later I grew up a bit and realized that in 1944 and 1945 my father helped sink German ships which were evacuating refugees from Riga and Tallinn. Hundreds if not thousands of people met their deaths in the waters of the Baltic—for which my father was decorated. I’ve long since ceased being proud of him, but nor do I condemn him. There was a war on, and my father won in that war. He was avenging his brother.

My father went off to war as a volunteer at the age of eighteen—to avenge Boris, he would tell me. His older brother was killed in the summer of 1941.

As a child I’d spend every summer at my grandmother’s, in the holiday village of Udelnaya near Moscow. A wall in her room was hung with old photos. One showed her sons: two teenage brothers sitting in embrace, head to head, floppy ears touching. Nowadays everyone always smiles on photos, but these two gazed seriously into the camera as if they had foreknowledge of everything that would soon happen to them. Another snapshot showed a youth in headphones: a ham-radio aficionado, Boris was training to be a telephonist.

I remember Grandma unfolding the frayed old sheet of paper marked “NOTIFICATION,” kissing it and wiping away tears. He was twenty. Looking at my son today, I find this simply impossible to imagine. He’s just a boy still, no more than a kid. But back then, Boris seemed like a big grown-up hero to me.

My grandfather was a peasant from down Tambov way. He was arrested in the midst of collectivization in 1930. Grandma would tell me about how, when requisitioners arrived at their yard to take away the cow, he became indignant at being left with nothing to feed two little children. He was arrested and sent off to Siberia to build the Baikal–Amur Mainline. He managed to pass on two short letters before vanishing. When Grandma was dying, aged ninety-five, her mind started going a bit, and everything that happened to her in 1930 began resurfacing. I’d phone her, I remember, and at first she’d speak to me as normal, but then she’d suddenly start asking, “Who is this? Misha? Who’s Misha?” And I’d tell her, “It’s me, Misha!” Her husband, my grandfather, was also called Mikhail, and she’d scream down the phone, “What are you doing? Leave him be! Don’t take him away! Let him go! Misha, where are they taking you?” She had been transported back to that year, and her husband was being arrested all over again. To avoid dying of hunger, Grandma had to flee the village with her two children, my father and Uncle Borya. She found a job as a cleaner near Moscow before spending the rest of her life as a kindergarten nurse.

On every form he filled out, my father held back the fact that he was the son of an enemy of the people, and he lived his whole life in fear that this would come out into the open. It’s so important for a son to be proud of his father. But it was fear, not pride, that dwelt in my father’s soul.

That frayed and yellowed document Grandma kissed and cried over wasn’t actually a notice of death, but a notification that Boris was missing in action somewhere in the Kandalaksha area. Such an odd word that it stuck in my memory. This is a small town in Karelia. Now I realize she was forever hoping that he hadn’t perished, that he was still alive somewhere. “Missing in action”—what does this mean, exactly? Could mean anything. And she thought, What if he’s still alive, what if we’re to meet again? And my father harboured the same hope about his brother.

Grandma died in ’93, my father in ’95. And then, in 2010, something happened—the sort of thing that normally happens in films or books, not in real life. I was in Norway. A translation of my novel Maidenhair had been released there, and I was invited on a tour of speaking engagements across several cities. My Norwegian translator Marit Bjerkeng and I were strolling around Tromsø, a town in the country’s far north, and we popped into the small local museum. Two diminutive rooms housed an exhibition about Soviet POWs in Norway during the war years. The retreating Germans evacuated their camps from Finland to the Tromsø region. And all of a sudden I remembered that word from my childhood—Kandalaksha. That was where the notification had come from! Kandalaksha was somewhere in Karelia. And I thought, what if my Uncle Borya had been captured there, and was then transferred to Norway in 1944 together with the other prisoners? Marit helped me make an enquiry to the Norwegian archives. A copy of the registration card of POW Boris Shishkin was found immediately and sent to me by email.

POW’S PERSONAL CARD. ISSUED AUGUST 29, 1941. STALAG 309. All their camps were called Stalag—a contraction of Stammlager. This number designated a network of camps in Finland. Every POW was given a metal ID tag, and his number was 1249. SHISHKIN, BORIS. BORN DECEMBER 30, 1920, IN THE VILLAGE OF NOVO-YURIEVO. NATIONALITY: RUSSIAN. PRIVATE, MILITARY UNIT NUMBER. CIVILIAN PROFESSION: RADIO-MECHANIC. TAKEN CAPTIVE AUGUST 27. IN GOOD HEALTH. FINGERPRINT. SURNAME AND ADDRESS OF KIN IN POW’S COUNTRY OF ORIGIN. MOTHER: LYUBOV SHISHKINA—my grandmother.

Reading this, I came into a sharp realization of what it was to be resurrected from the dead. This person, my twenty-year-old uncle, now thirty-three years my junior—this boy had suddenly come back to life! And it hurt so much that neither my grandmother nor my father had lived to see this day.

I went straight off to the Internet, and you can find everything there, including information on this Stammlager 309. Photographs, investigations, documents. Stories of people who were imprisoned there and survived. There were even photographs of firing-squad executions taken on the sly by a German soldier. POWs were predominantly employed in construction—they built railways. I read about POW telephonists—and realized: of course, that was him! He must have been given work within his profession!

On the reverse of the card was a note: ES BESTEHT DIE VERMUTUNG, DASS DER KRIEGSGEFANGENE JUDE IST, LAUT AUSSAGEN EINES VERTRAUTEN MANNES. WURDE AM 25.7.1942 DER SICHERHEITSPOLIZEI ÜBERGEBEN. Which means he was shot.

In the course of my Internet research on Stalag 309 I came across a photograph of executed POWs in a big pit. Perhaps one of them was my father’s brother.

How can I convey this feeling? My uncle Borya has just been resurrected—and he’s been killed again. It’s a good thing after all, I remember thinking, that Dad and Grandma didn’t live to see this!

That he was killed as a Jew is, of course, astonishing. He was of Tambov peasant stock, going back generations. Evidently someone had got square with him: the slightest denunciation might get you shot.

I set about tracking down that photograph from my childhood. Our family archive was destroyed ten years ago when my brother’s house near Moscow burnt down. I got in contact with my father’s last wife, Zinaida Vasilievna, but after moving house numerous times she had nothing left. It’s extraordinary: I see it right before my eyes, that prewar snap of the youth in headphones, but it exists nowhere except within me.

Every document, every photograph, everything that should be kept in the family from generation to generation—it has all perished. But it all still survives in what remains of that machine of death. Why? How on earth can this be?

I was also struck that a Russian translation had been written onto the card in someone’s hand. Who did the translation? What for? When? There was a Russian stamp, too: PERSONAL REGISTRATION CARD AMENDED. REFERENCE NUMBER 452. 1941. And a handwritten word: Notified. Meaning that Boris’s mother, my grandmother, had been sent the paper she was to cry over for so many years.

It turned out that all these archives were transferred to Russia after the war and are held to this day in Podolsk, near Moscow. My grandmother and my father lived so many years in ignorance of their Boris’s fate, and it was their own country, for whose sake Boris had died, that held the truth back from them. Only after Perestroika were the archives opened temporarily, and Western historians made copies of them. I received Uncle Borya’s card from the Norwegian archives within a single week, yet Grandma and Dad received no news of him from their own state in a whole lifetime.

Information concerning POWs was kept secret because in reality the state was waging war against its own people. My relatives, my loved ones lived out their entire lives in a prison nation which used them for its wars and despised them.

When Perestroika began, my father made an enquiry to the KGB about the fate of his father. All the victims of Stalin’s repressions were being rehabilitated. He showed me an official letter confirming the rehabilitation of his father, my grandfather. Charges were being dismissed for lack of corpus delicti. Dad had been tanking up since morning and would only bellow, “Bastards! Bastards!”

After the war he drank his whole life through. And all his submariner friends, too. They probably couldn’t do otherwise. It was the disease of their generation. Aged eighteen, he spent months on end immured in a submarine, haunted by the constant fear of drowning in an iron coffin. An experience like that can shackle you for the rest of your life.

Under Gorbachev, when the really hungry years began, my veteran father received food parcels containing produce from Germany. In his eyes this represented a personal humiliation. He and his friends had seen themselves as victors their whole lives, and now he was forced to feed from the hand of the vanquished foe. He regarded the collapse of the USSR as defeat in a war he had waged together with the rest of the country. My father hated Gorbachev.

I didn’t like Gorbachev either, but precisely for the reason that he did everything in his power to prevent the collapse of the USSR and the entire Soviet system. My father and I viewed the history being made around us from opposite vantage points. There was an unbridgeable gulf between us. We had long since ceased to be close to one another. And this, of course, had little to do with politics.

The final straw leading to our estrangement came at my wedding. Inviting him, I remember, was a conciliatory gesture on my part. Dad got drunk, started a punch-up, and I had to restrain him with the help of a friend and pack him off home in a taxi. It was hard for me to forgive him such things.

It’s so important to be proud of one’s father. But I was ashamed of mine.

I started communicating with him again only shortly before his death. He spent his last years simply destroying himself with vodka. Denied his drink, he’d start smashing up everything in the house. Zinaida Vasilievna stopped fighting for him—she herself would buy him his bottles so he’d get sozzled and quickly pass out. He drank so much it seemed strange his body was still holding up. All his submariner friends had long since drunk themselves into the grave. My father must’ve been in a hurry to rejoin his war buddies. Out of their whole boat he was the last man standing.

At the funeral feast Zinaida Vasilievna told of how my father died:

“He’s fallen off the bed and he yells, ‘Zina! Zina, I can’t see anything! Turn the light on! The light! I need more light!’ It is light, Pasha, I say, it’s sunny outside!”

It was odd that my bibulous veteran-submariner father should have uttered the same dying cry as Goethe.

For as long as I can remember, my father always said that, upon his death, he must be laid in the coffin wearing his sailor’s uniform. And at the morgue a grey-haired swabby was wheeled out to us in an open coffin. Lately his whole body had been quaking and shaking, but now, arms folded on his chest, he had an air of serenity, as if mollified by the thought that he wasn’t being cremated just any-old-how, but in his striped sailor’s jersey.

The coffin turned out to be too short. His head wouldn’t fit—it was wedged up against the coffin wall, his chin pressing into his chest—and his face wore a strange, lively expression which betrayed mild annoyance. Can’t even put me into the coffin properly, it seemed to be saying.

Zinaida Vasilievna went off to remonstrate with the morgue authorities, but they just jabbed a finger at the receipt: You ordered 180 cm, we put him in 180 cm. A woman in a grubby white coat and rubber gloves came out and started explaining that coffins must be ordered with room to spare because dead bodies tend to stretch:

“Were you unaware of that or what?”

Zinaida Vasilievna waved a hand, loath to get involved:

“Do whatever you want! I’ve no strength left to deal with this.”

We had to go to the crematorium at Mitino. A bus was laid on, caked with dirt to the very windows. I made to close the coffin. Nails had already been hammered into the lid, but I only noticed this when it wouldn’t shut properly. I took a look: a nail had lodged itself right into the top of my father’s head. Something reddish-blue had oozed out of the ripped skin and into his grey hair. The coffin was left open.

As I sat in that screechy, clapped-out bus—clutching the seat for fear of being sent flying by a pothole, my leg keeping the coffin from sliding away—I remembered the bike rides to Ilyinsky Forest Dad and I went on every August before school started. Time and again he’d shoot off ahead on his heavy trophy cycle. “Dad, wait!” I’d yell, and I’d try and catch him up on my Orlyonok, hop-skipping over tree-roots: there were pines all around, and weaving along the paths would’ve been better. At times you’d come across sandy areas, and your tires would sink.

In the crematorium, when the time had come to close the coffin, I bent the nail to the side as best as I could so Dad would be spared more pain.

Shortly before he died, my father resolved to have us photographed together.

“What for?” I said.

He tried to convince me:

“I’ll pop my clogs, Mishka, and you’ll look at the photo and maybe you’ll think back to your old man the sailor!”

“All right, old-man-the-sailor, let’s go!” I said, just to get him off my back.

We went to a photo-studio near their house just outside Strogino. We sat down in front of a Lumière-brothers-era camera. The photographer, a young girl with a boyish hairdo, said, pulling a strand of gum from between her teeth, “You could do with a smile!”

Our attempt to produce one couldn’t have been too convincing: “Say cheese, now!” laughed the girl.

Just recently I was looking for something or other, going through old papers, and suddenly there it was—that very photo. Dad and I, earlobes touching, both with cheese in our mouths.

My son phoned in the evening, when he was changing trains in Brig, and I drove down in my old Golf to pick him up at the station in Leuk.

He came out of the train with a massive backpack—that’s how he travels the world. We hugged. Every time I see him these days, I marvel at how grown-up he’s become—a whole head taller than me now.

On the way back I pestered him with silly pointless questions about his studies, about university, about his flatmates. He studies in Vienna. Historisch-Kulturwissenschaftliche Europaforschung. He told me about his amusing professors, whom he loves for their love of history, and I listened enviously. I studied foreign languages at the Lenin Pedagogical Institute, but the principal subjects there were history of the Communist Party and scientific communism. And I hated the professors. How strange that slavery should be known as a science.

While he took a shower and unpacked, I got supper ready: fried potatoes with onion and sausages.

“Mmm, smells good!” he shouted from his room.

We ate at the table by the window, looking on as the Weisshorn glowed pinker and pinker in the sunset. Alpenglühen. I told him about my encounter with my father on the mountain path.

“I barely remember Granddad. Tell me something about him! What can you remember from your childhood?”

And I started telling him about what I could still recall. About how, when he was drunk, my father would always start belting out the 60s hit “Mishka, Mishka, Where’s Your Smile?” and, wrapping his great big arms around me, a preschooler, he’d make me sing along, but I tried to struggle free—his drunken stench was horrible. And about how we’d go cycling in Ilyinsky Forest. And about other odds and ends. Suddenly it transpired that the long years of my childhood had been distilled into a mere handful of recollections.

One involved a trick my ex-submariner had once shown me. I see it clearly: we’re going for a haircut on a Sunday, and I’m whingeing—I’m scared of the hair-clipper and I hate the barber’s. He’s pulling me by the arm, and look, he says, look at this trick! And, miraculously, Dad’s become a giant, and he’s holding out on his palm a tram that’s pulled in to a stop.

My son laughed and said that I’d shown him that same trick when he was a kid. Only it wasn’t a tram I had on my palm, but the high-riser on Vosstaniya Square.

We started reminiscing about his own childhood. About how we went off to meet his mum at the station one day, and it was so heaving with people we were scared we’d lose her, and then I sat him on my shoulders, and he saw her and yelled at the top of his lungs, “Mummy, mummy! We’re here!”—and was dead proud later on because he thought that, had he not spied his mum out in the crowd from the height of my shoulders, she’d never have found us.

“Tell me,” he asked, “what’s the happiest childhood memory you have of your father?”

I remembered the haymow. Born in the countryside and into a peasant family, my father lived his whole life the wrong way—as a city-dweller, spending years in some office—but he yearned to be a peasant, to work the land that had been taken away from them. And so, come summertime in the dacha, he loved working with the soil, planting apple trees, crafting, digging, building. He always dreamt of sleeping outside, on a haymow, rather than in the house. Once he brought a whole haycock over from somewhere and fixed himself a bed right under the open sky. I was about seven or eight, and I cajoled him into letting me sleep with him. It was such a delight to lie on that prickly bed, nuzzling into my father’s shoulder and breathing in the overwhelming fragrance of the hay! It being August, stars were falling. We lay there, the universe looming above us, and looked on as meteors streaked across the sky.

We sat and talked, my son and I, until it was completely dark and the stars had risen over the Valais. And suddenly he said, “Let’s go!”

It was cool outside now. We wrapped ourselves in blankets and settled down into armchairs on the lawn in front of the chalet. Lights shimmered in the valley. The last of the day lingered in the western sky, and the Milky Way hung low overhead. It was uncannily quiet, even the breeze had fallen silent. Just us and the stars. But not one deigned to fall.

Sitting like that, heads jerked skywards, was uncomfortable, so we lay ourselves down on the broad, sturdy table. Head to head, ears touching. We talked about anything and everything. Reminisced some more about childhood. Then he told me about his girlfriend. About how much he loves her. Though she no longer does.

Later it got seriously cold, but we were loath to head back into the warmth: we still hadn’t seen a single star fall over Brentschen.

Finally we headed back inside to sleep, it was really late now.

Before going to bed I popped into his room to say good night.

“You know, Dad, if I ever have a son and he asks me to recall some happy moments with my father, I’ll definitely think back to tonight—to how we lay on the table under the night sky here in Brentschen, watching stars fall.”

“But not a single one did.”

“What difference does it make!”

We were silent for a while. Then I said, “It’s late. Good night! Get some sleep! We’ll talk plenty more tomorrow.”

“Good night!”

And then I remembered what I’d been meaning to ask him the whole day, but kept forgetting:

“Oh yes—tell me, what doesn’t fit into that saucepan that’s big enough to hold everything?”

“Oh come on, Dad,” he laughed, “it’s simple! That would be the saucepan lid!”

The lid!

But of course! How didn’t I twig at once!