Invented Lives

by Andrea Goldsmith

  Contents

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  1 DEATH AND RECKLESS BEHAVIOUR IN LENINGRAD

  2 IN TRANSIT

  3 THE RIGHT JOB FOR A SHY MAN

  4 PROSPECTING FOR HOME

  5 UNSTUCK BUT NOT UNDONE

  6 LIFE AND DEATH IN THE SOVIET UNION

  7 LANDMARKS OF A LIFE

  8 A GOOD MARRIAGE

  9 OLD SOVIET, NEW AUSTRALIAN

  10 OWLS OF THE DESERT

  11 UNCHARTED WATERS

  12 LIFE’S RAFFLE

  13 MANIFEST DESTINIES

  14 LOVE AND OBLIGATIONS

  15 CLANDESTINE MOMENTS

  16 YOU MUST CHANGE YOUR LIFE

  17 UNDER THE AUSTRALIAN SUN

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  INVENTED LIVES

  Andrea Goldsmith originally trained as a speech pathologist, and was a pioneer in the development of communication aids for people unable to speak. Her first novel, Gracious Living, was published in 1989. This was followed by Modern Interiors, Facing the Music, Under the Knife, and The Prosperous Thief, which was short-listed for the 2003 Miles Franklin Literary Award. Reunion was published in 2009, and The Memory Trap was awarded the 2015 Melbourne Prize. Her literary essays have appeared in Meanjin, Australian Book Review, Best Australian Essays, and numerous anthologies. Her shorter articles and reviews are posted at www.andreagoldsmith.com.au. Andrea Goldsmith lives in Melbourne.

  Scribe Publications

  18–20 Edward St, Brunswick, Victoria 3056, Australia

  2 John St, Clerkenwell, London, WC1N 2ES, United Kingdom

  3754 Pleasant Ave, Suite 100, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55409 USA

  First published by Scribe 2019

  Copyright © Andrea Goldsmith 2019

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  9781925713589 (Australian edition)

  9781947534902 (US edition)

  9781925693492 (e-book)

  A CiP entry for this title is available from the National Library of Australia.

  scribepublications.com.au

  scribepublications.com

  scribepublications.co.uk

  To the Porters:

  Jean, Chester, Maudie and Josie

  ‘Exile itself has become an emblem, no matter whether it is experienced by someone in his own country, his own room, and in his own language, or outside and far removed from them. The moment we are all experiencing is convulsive. The theatre of the world is convulsive … no matter where we live. We are all exiles.’

  Norman Manea, The Fifth Impossibility

  ‘I am like a pelican of the wilderness:

  I am like an owl of the desert.’

  Psalm 102

  1

  DEATH AND RECKLESS BEHAVIOUR IN LENINGRAD

  Galina Kogan completed the documents to record her mother’s death. She filled out forms to stop wages, cancel benefits, and nullify identity papers. She parted with a week’s pay for a coffin, and when told that transport from the state mortuary to the cemetery would be delayed several days, another fistful of notes solved the problem. A few more roubles here, a few more there, and her mother would be laid to rest the following week.

  It was now official: Lidiya Yuryevna Kogan had died at 8.37, on the morning of Wednesday, 27th November, 1985.

  Galina gathered up all the documents. The bag was bulging with her mother’s belongings, so she shoved the papers down a side pocket. She fixed her mother’s watch to her own wrist, surprised to see it was already four o’clock; this day of her mother’s death had passed without her noticing. She hefted the bag over her shoulder and hurried along the corridor to the stairs. She made a brief phone call in the hospital foyer to say she was on her way home, and finally emerged through the doors into the fresh air outside.

  Winter had powered in during the last weeks of her mother’s illness, weeks stretched by death’s determined assault against her mother’s steadfast grip on life. Fully occupied by the struggle playing out before her, Galina had given no thought to the weather. But now as she entered the street, she slammed into the cold. Her winter coat was still packed away in the trunk — the rest of life so callously undisturbed while her mother lay dying — and her jacket, the one she had worn every day since her mother’s stroke, was no match for the weather. Yet, despite the chill, and despite there being a trolley bus in sight, she needed time to think, to collect herself, to pull together a life that had just lost its centre.

  She wrapped her scarf about her head and knotted it at the neck, thrust her hands deep in her pockets, and set off through the sombre streets. The smell of the hospital lingered, and she wondered if she’d ever be rid of it. She quickened her pace, but her legs resisted; she tried to order her thoughts, but her brain had turned to slush.

  She was heading home, although her mother’s death had already stripped it of homeliness. There’d be relatives and friends waiting, and food and drink and an explosion of memories. But Lidiya had provided a sense of home that went beyond their flat, beyond the old books and the new TV, beyond the table where they ate and worked, beyond the sallow green stairwell with its human reek, beyond the building itself, only twenty years old and already frayed and weary. Lidiya had been sanctuary.

  And what now for the future — their future, which had just shrunk to her future? What now for emigration? They knew when they submitted their papers they were signing over the right to change their minds — not that it mattered then, as they had no intention of doing so. And in the months since, despite Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika, despite his heralding new freedoms and greater prosperity, they’d not wavered. Her mother had scoffed at Gorbachev’s promises. The trouble with Russia, she’d said, was that nothing fundamentally changed. Thaws were followed by crackdowns, crackdowns were followed by thaws, so why should it be any different on Gorbachev’s watch?

  ‘We’ve an opportunity to leave. Best to go when we can.’

  Officially they were emigrating to Israel, the only permissible destination for Soviet Jews, yet they had no Zionist yearnings nor religious stirrings; in fact, they lacked all but the most rudimentary knowledge of how to be Jewish. But given the push and snarl of Russia’s chronic anti-Semitism, not a day passed without a reminder that ethnically they were Jewish. This was such a common aspect of life in the Soviet Union that Galina had accepted, with neither rancour nor resentment, that the bribes she’d had to pay for her mother’s funeral were more numerous and hefty than those extracted from Russians. It was, simply, the way things were.

  They had planned to change their destination from Israel to America once they got to Vienna. Or was it Rome where they were to make the change? Galina’s head had fogged up. Vienna or Rome? She couldn’t remember. Her mother had died, and it seemed that memory and reason had cut and run. How was she going to manage? Whether here or elsewhere in the world, how would she manage the future alone?

  Her breath was drawing short and harsh. She stopped by a canal, pulled the air into her lungs, and forced out a slow exhalation. She felt faint, and leaned against the iron railings for support. The metal was sharp and cold against the bones of her hips; she pressed in harder. The surface of the water was an oily, dark opalescence — strangely beautifu
l, she found herself thinking. Garbage bobbed against the canal walls, ducks poked about looking for spoils, a barge and a smaller boat chugged past. She closed her eyes and slipped into a gentle, muted world where life seemed to have stopped. It was a brief respite, however, for intruding into this twilight zone came her own clear voice: You’re twenty-four years old, Galina Kogan. You’re an adult, and you’re on your own. So pull yourself together.

  She opened her eyes, took one last deep breath, pressed her hands to her chest as if that would squeeze the terror out, and set off again.

  It was not yet dusk, but with the low, swarthy clouds it might have been night. Street lights glowed with that frosted halo that hinted at snow; noises were smudged as if coming from a great distance. There was no wind. Galina felt weirdly disconnected from the world, a world that had moved into the future while she sat in limbo with her dying mother. And yet she’d made an attempt to keep up with events, had read Leningradskaya Pravda to her mother every day, and when her mother no longer responded, had read to pass the time. A volcano had erupted in Colombia, killing twenty-five thousand people — and why, she wondered, was her own single death so much more weighty than all those dead Colombians? She’d read about bomb attacks in Paris, and hijackings in the Mediterranean. Then, a week ago in Geneva, General Secretary Gorbachev and President Reagan of America had met for the very first time. It had been rumoured that the situation of Soviet Jews was on the agenda, along with arms control. There was no way of knowing whether Soviet Jews had, in fact, been discussed. As for arms control, it simply made no sense, not after years of being told of the necessity of a great Soviet arsenal as security against the war-mongering, untrustworthy Americans. But then so much in the Soviet Union made no sense. It gave traction to her mother’s joke that Soviet citizens, while starved of the comforts of life, were gourmands when it came to swallowing absurdities.

  No more of her mother’s jokes now.

  They had been told regularly of the Soviet Union’s superiority in nuclear weapons — it was anyone’s guess as to whether this was true or not — but what every Soviet citizen knew without a skerrick of doubt was that America was the land of plenty, the émigré’s El Dorado. They were told that poverty was endemic in America, that education and housing were in a parlous state, that only the very corrupt or the very rich could afford to be sick, that photographs of shops full of goods were not real shops, but rather staged sets for the cameras. Yet despite the official line, every Russian knew there was plenty of food in America, and huge stores filled with clothes and household goods. It was not just the American films they saw, the Soviet Union’s thriving black market was proof of the quality and range of American goods.

  There had been a photograph in the paper of Gorbachev and Reagan standing together surrounded by their advisors, the Soviet team clearly distinguishable from the American, and film of the meeting had been shown on the Vremya news, so that aspect of the report — that the leaders were meeting — was true. Gorbachev, stylish in his Italian suit, looked like a Westerner. As to what had been discussed, she’d learned from her mother always to be suspicious of reports in the official press.

  A year ago, such a meeting between the two leaders would have been inconceivable, but then a year ago it was equally inconceivable that her mother would suffer a massive brain haemorrhage. Some changes, like having the bathroom tap fixed at the communal apartments or being allocated your own flat, seemed to take years. Other changes, like the gas explosion in the block near her old school, or the death of her fifty-seven-year-old mother, were shocking in their suddenness.

  It wasn’t that she wanted her mother alive again, not in the dreadful state the stroke had rendered her. She wanted life as it had been before the stroke, their papers to emigrate submitted, the two of them sifting through their possessions trying to decide what to take, and both of them managing to save as much as possible because as soon as their request to emigrate was approved, they knew they’d be forced to leave their jobs (and if their application was refused, they’d lose their jobs anyway). In short, they were living for today while making preparations for tomorrow: a new life in America, where everyone was equal, where her mother, a translator and teacher of languages, would find work that matched her experience and abilities, and where Galina, herself, could draw what she liked, confined only by her own artistic limitations and not by the state. She was a Soviet Jew and a Russian illustrator. The irony had long struck her: both the Jew and the artist were censored here.

  Galina pulled her hand from her pocket and brushed her face. Just when she thought things couldn’t get worse, it had begun to snow, only a few wet flakes at the moment, but gearing up for more. If she believed in a god, she’d think she was being punished. But for what? Nothing in her twenty-four years would warrant the illness and death of her still-young mother, nor the twenty-year absence of a father she couldn’t remember, nor an impending blizzard on a day when it already took all her energy just to remain upright and moving.

  She tugged at her scarf, shoved both hands deeper into her coat and continued on her way. And suddenly she was on the ground, pitched forward on the uneven brick paving. A sickening pain filled her knee.

  She needed to move, she couldn’t move.

  Galina is lying in a stink of urine and ancient filth. She wants to fade out, she wants not to be here. Where is oblivion exactly? she is wondering. And what is it about Leningrad paving that prises the bricks from their cement beds? Might there be tiny earthquakes occurring all over the city?

  A strange man is hovering over her. His hands are flapping, and a barrage of Russian mixed with English is spilling out of him. Life as she has known it stopped this morning, and now, in full view of everyone, she’s the target of a hysterical foreigner.

  ‘Please.’ She manages to find some English. ‘Please, I am all right.’

  The man is crouched over her, she can smell onions. ‘Please, sir, move away. I need air.’

  He utters a stream of apologies, grabs a scarf from his neck, rolls it into a sausage and places it under her head. He stands back, his face bright red. He’s clearly embarrassed, and so he ought to be. Not that she cares; and it occurs to her she doesn’t really care about anything anymore. She turns her back to him, closes her eyes, and curls up small. The whoosh of tyres, a blitz of car horns, the stop-start wheeze of a bus come to her muffled, as if through water. It’s not unpleasant, a sort of holding bay for life, and she tries to insert her mother — her healthy, vibrant mother. But the bed-ridden figure of the past terrible weeks, with the face shrivelling over the skull, the twisted mouth, the perpetual drool, refuses to be dislodged. And suddenly the abysmal thought: it might never be.

  You’re on your own, she tells herself again. You’re lying on the filthy ground, a blizzard could be on the way, there’s a foreigner fussing over you, and you’re on your own. And as much as she wants to stay right where she is, she makes herself move. The stranger is watching her. The flush has left his face; his skin is smooth and unmarked — healthy skin, which for some reason makes her think of oranges.

  He steps towards her. ‘Let me help you.’

  Tall and unmistakeably Western, he is dressed in Levis and a sheepskin jacket; his blond wavy hair, clean and lush, is swept back from his forehead, he wears no hat. She guesses he is much the same age as she is, although Westerners always look younger than their years. It’s impossible to know who or what he is, whether friend or foe. Not that it matters. In kindergarten, in school, in the Pioneers, in the Komsomol, at university, at work, wherever you are in the Soviet system, you’re told that all foreigners are suspect, and all are to be avoided. Although now, at this moment, if anyone is watching her — and all prospective émigrés can expect to be watched — she’s simply too exhausted to care.

  Life without her mother is not about to wait any longer. She shoves her pains aside, stretches out her hand, and the foreigner grasps it. As he leans down, sh
e sees the skin of his throat. It is bronzed and unblemished, and there is a scent about him — not the onions, but something fresh and spicy; she breathes it in. He keeps his arm about her until she has regained her balance. His apologies are profuse, his touch gentle, and to her horror, she feels tears; she swallows hard, takes her time to find a steady voice, insists she is not hurt. But no amount of reassurance will placate him.

  ‘I could have caused you a serious injury,’ he says.

  ‘You have not hurt me.’ She is surprised at the ease of her English when everything else is in tatters. ‘It is not your fault. The paving is a mess, and I was not watching where I was going.’

  ‘Neither was I.’ The man pauses a moment before adding, ‘I’d stopped to look at the snow.’

  Not simply a foreigner, but a mad one to be lingering in freezing temperatures gazing at a few miserable snowflakes.

  ‘I’ve only seen snow once before.’ His face is again bright red.

  ‘In your entire life?’ This man is clearly no spy, no enemy of any kind.

  He nods.

  ‘Where on earth are you from?’

  She hears him say Austria. But no, he repeats it, Australia, the big country at the bottom of the world. ‘Not much snow down there,’ he says. And after a moment he adds, ‘Most Australians respond to snow as you Russians do to kangaroos.’

  She feels the muscles around her jaw protest: it has been a long time since she smiled. Her very first English-language book, which was also her mother’s first English book, was called Babies at the Zoo; and of all the baby animals in the book, the kangaroo was her favourite. Accompanying each illustration was a short poem written by the great Samuil Marshak. She can still recite the one about the kangaroo.

  And suddenly she sees her mother, pre-stroke Lidiya, sitting with her younger self, and the two of them are reading this book together. She is so tempted to prolong the image, to grasp her mother’s aliveness, but knows she can’t, not right now. But tomorrow and next week and next year this image, and she desperately hopes others too, of a healthy Lidiya will come back to her. For the moment she distracts herself with busyness. The bag has spilled its contents; she thrusts them back, smooths herself down, twists her hair under her scarf, and starts on her way.