A TRIBUTE TO MY MOTHERS

Dear Chloe and Astrid,

I shared a tribute to my fathers with you some time ago, and it is high time that I do the same for my mothers. This time the plural refers to my mother and two grandmothers and also my mother-in law, Francine. Just as with father figures, “mothering” is a broad concept. Some of it is very direct in our lives, and some of it is more like an ideal to aspire to – or maybe a warning to heed.

Let me start with the two mothers who raised me: my mom and her mom, my beloved babushka, who lived with us since I was three years old. If you are a girl, dealing with MOTHER may not always be the easiest thing. My mother was the kind of person I was always expected to “measure up” to. Of course, I was growing up in the middle of World War II: running from bombs in my birthplace of Yugoslavia, starving in forced labor and then refugee camps in Germany, and having to change languages every few years was our given “normal.” 

It was only much later that I came to realize that we would probably not have made it without mother’s remarkable survival skills. During the German occupation in Yugoslavia, she was the one who would drag in, after hours of standing in line, the indispensable bag of potatoes. And when it looked like the war was coming to an end, we were faced with a new dilemma. My family were Russian exiles in Yugoslavia. They had fought on the losing side of the Russian Revolution of 1917, and now our choice was to be taken into forced labor camps by the retreating Germans – or to be liberated by the Soviet Army. Mother, as usual, found a way: she had a Russian friend who was married to an ethnic German. There were ethnic Germans who had lived in Yugoslavia for several generations, and they were now organizing convoys to head back “home.” We were allowed to join one of their convoys.

Germany, however, was not exactly “home” to us. Just the same, thanks to mother’s friend, we were placed into a “good” labor camp. Unlike the extermination camps reserved for Jews and Slavs, this camp was holding French, Belgian, and Dutch prisoners of war. Mom and dad disappeared into a munitions factory from early morning to late at night, while I stayed in the barracks with my grandmother and a bunch of strangers. There was no heating and no food that I can remember.

Once again, mother rose to the occasion. It so happens that she had had a German governess back in Russia, and was fairly fluent in German. She managed to locate a school near our camp, and asked the school principal to take me in. Her name was Frau Dopner, and after some hesitation, she agreed. While the German kids had a version of food stamps, I did not. I still feel the smell of steamed potatoes and fake sausages at lunch time: and while all the German kids were allowed one sausage, I was given two. Even so I was not doing well and Frau Dopner arranged for me to see a German doctor. He diagnosed me with TB, and she arranged for me to be hospitalized. In short, she had actually defied the authorities to do all this, and she saved my life.

After the end of the war the camps we lived in during the next four years were called “displaced persons” camps, and they were run by the UNRA (United Nations Relief Agency). We lived in primitive barracks, were given old clothes, and our food from the food kitchen was mostly oat soup:  for this we were infinitely grateful. Of course, mom worked overtime. She made dolls from scraps of cloth and trudged to German farms to barter them for milk and eggs. We were given greenish army blankets, and mom stayed up nights sewing them into warm winter clothes for us.

Schooling, however, proved to be a problem in these camps – although not to me. I had a lot of friends, we loved looking for treasures on the garbage dump near our latest camp, and understood each other perfectly across half a dozen of Slavic and Baltic languages. But when the adults finally got their act together to organize a school, my mom checked it out and decided to send me, instead, to a German school outside of the camp.  REALLY? While all my friends stayed back in the camp? Really.

Our next move, it turned out, was Morocco, which was a French colony. My dad got a job there because he was fluent in French as well as Russian. Mom, of course, expected him to teach me French, but he took me fishing instead. But she caught up with me anyway. The little mining town we ended up in on the southern slope of the Atlas Mountains had no schools, and she sent me to a boarding school in Marrakech.

It never stops. I am a teenager by now, and at home on vacation. Morocco’s climate is hot, and there is no air conditioning. As a result, mom who works as an accountant, has to be at work at 7 a.m. SO? So, she shakes me awake at 5 a.m. to go play tennis with her. REALLY? Really. “I was a pole-vaulting champion in Belgrade at your age,” she tells me. “Let’s go.”

One constant in our wandering lives had been the use of the Russian language at home: it never occurred to me to tell my babushka that I would NOT speak Russian with her. Besides, it would have deprived me of all the Russian fairy tales she told me at bed time. I practically grew up with Vasilisa the Fair, the beautiful maiden who had to deal with the impossible tasks the wicked witch, Baba Yaga, imposed on her. Lucky for her, the “grey wolf” would always sally out of the dark forest in the nick of time, and rescue her.

In some ways, babushka’s fairy tales reflected our lives. When we had first arrived in Morocco, the mining town was not built yet, and we were parked in a house in the middle of nowhere. There was no running water and no electricity. And last but not least, we had to use an outhouse. I could hear the howling of jackals in the distance and expected sticks on the ground to turn into hissing snakes. And since we were in a Muslim country, I was sure that evil djinnies were lurking about in the dark of night. And what did my mother say? “Don’t be a scaredy cat, just go.” I remember stepping out one evening, shaking with terror – and what did I see ahead by the outhouse? My guardian angel, my babushka. She had sneaked out through the back door, and stood there waiting for me.

Clearly, mother and babushka represented strikingly different models of womanhood. Mom had given me life in one heroic push and continued to do so, pushing me out into more life with an outpouring of warnings and expectations. Babushka was different. She neither exhorted nor protested, she neither demanded nor beseeched. Instead, she had fed and washed and clothed me, and sung me to sleep, and kissed away my bruises. She was the one who tied me to life by a myriad ties so ordinary that they were invisible.

But eventually the flow of time takes one to adulthood, and you have to manage on your own. My babushka died in Morocco and my mom, later, died in Australia. Why Australia? We landed on this new continent in 1958 because Morocco claimed independence from the French, and it was no longer a safe place for Europeans. Australia promised safety, but we still had a problem: we didn’t know English. But my mom had not trained me in vain, and I prepared to start all over again.

In time, however, it was the French language that came to the rescue. I met Rick, a francophone Belgian boy, and we got married. But his parents had been transferred to the United States, and they were inviting us to join them. I had been uprooted many times, and a trip to yet another continent did not alarm me. What I now worried about was leaving my parents behind. They had been the emotional soil no country had provided: they had been my fatherland and motherland, safe haven, home and heartland. How would I manage without them?

 But they gave me their blessing to venture into my new life. Rick and I were to travel by boat, but as I stepped on board it felt like I was entering Noah’s Ark: my past receded slowly with the vanishing coastline – but the future was an unchartered sea.

I had been worried about meeting Rick’s parents, and I had looked forward to the thrills of New York. But it was New York that proved a challenge. I had never been in a place with sky- scrapers. The day I stepped out of the Grand Central Station in Manhattan and looked up, those giant towers looked like they were leaning over and preparing to crush me.  But when I looked ahead, the crowd on the sidewalk advanced five abreast, and prepared to mow me down: its myriad gaze was unseeing. Was I supposed to join their ranks? Did I have to? What would happen if I stood aside? Where was mom, who always knew what to do?  

That’s when Francine, my mother-in-law, stepped up to the plate. She sensed my troubles. We had moved in with them, and Stamford, Connecticut, was not as overwhelming as Manhattan. On the walls of my in-laws’ apartment hung reproductions of Flemish masters. Vermeer’s homely scenes and Francine’s unpretentious but immaculate home were a comment on each other. Rick found a good job, and they told me to take it easy and just rest. They had a good library, and I just sat there – reading or not reading.

This one time I look out the window: the clouds out there don’t move. I turn my head and notice, laid out on a plate just next to me, a small bunch of transparent green grapes. I had been having trouble eating and sleeping. Francine is sitting across from me, reading. The tempting grapes, the choice of the pretty plate, and the placement at my elbow just within reach happened by magic. I sense the magic coming from that quiet woman, Francine, my mother-in-law.

As it turned out, Rick and I did stay in the United States. In time, the sound and beat of Manhattan became the sound and beat of our hearts. The spell was broken: New York was ours. I went on occasional trips to visit my parents in Australia, and they visited us in return. And as a son and daughter were born to us, Frank and Francine remained an essential part of our growing family. And many years later, when Francine was widowed, I was able to take care of her the way she had taken care of me in my time of need.

But what about the other grandmother I mentioned earlier? I never met her. She had stayed back in Russia, and all I know about her is what my dad told me. She had been a graduate of the Smolny Institute of St. Petersburg, which had been founded by Empress Catherine the Great for the education of girls of noble birth. This “finishing school” caused her to be an accomplished pianist, and also good with charcoal and sketching pad. Apparently, she produced beautiful sketches of her beloved horses and greyhounds.

Just as the chance to know her in person had not been available to me, the chance of getting a glance at a picture of her had been lost as well. Dad told the story of how during the Civil War his White Guard unit was being pursued by a contingent of Red Guards, and how, fearing capture and likely repercussions for his family, he took the time, at full gallop, to tear up the photograph of his mother he had been carrying in his breast pocket. He did manage to elude his pursuers, however, and regretted all his life having destroyed the picture: a full-length shot of a young woman in a formal black gown, taken modishly from the back. Her head was tilted over her left shoulder showing her face in profile and the plunging “V” of her bare back: very much a Smolny graduate.

Since dad’s side of the Civil War had lost, and he ended up in exile for the rest of his life, he never saw his mother or his younger siblings again. At some point he did get a letter from one of his brothers through the International Red Cross. The news was that their mother had starved to death. STARVED TO DEATH? Phrases like World War I, the Russian Revolution, the Civil War, offered as an “explanation,” felt hollow. I struggled to translate the abstractions of history into tangible reality – the reality of the actual person who was my grandmother.

All I could do was imagine things – recreate her life and death from dad’s interrupted, broken memory. So, she had been a beautiful young woman dancing in crystal-lit ballrooms. And then? Dad had told me that their house had been built by French prisoners of war going back to Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812. I figured it must have been like a Southern ante-bellum mansion – a house likely overtaken by new masters since the Revolution. Was my grandmother allowed to stay in one of the dependencies? I imagined her making herself at home in some old shed.

 I imagined that at first what she missed most was the tea. You girls must have noticed the samovar I have on one of my stands. In those days in Russia there was a whole ritual to tea drinking. Slowly, the water is coming to a boil in the body of the samovar while the tea leaves seep in the fancy tea pot placed on top of it. And when the hostess deems the tea ready to serve, the tall glasses in their filigreed silver holders are filled and the fragrant tea is passed around.

But was it the tea she missed or the gathering of family and friends around the samovar? There used to be twelve, fifteen, maybe even twenty people around the table – all scattered far and wide now, many dead. She had blessed her first-born, my dad, to go fight against the Revolution. What of her two younger boys? What of her daughter? Were they in hiding somewhere? Were they alive? The country was in turmoil. In an attempt to feed the hungry cities, the new government had initiated forced food requisitions in the countryside, and that had caused peasant revolts and the burning of crops.

I imagined that my grandmother had been able to take her sketching pad into her hiding, and that she was sketching away: barns busting into flame, horses led away… There had been geese and ducks and chickens running about, but at night she would hear a sudden cackle, a fluttering of wings, and then there were none.

The dogs too had wandered off. They scoured the countryside in bands. But her favorite, Kashtanka, had stayed with her. They might have gone hunting together, but the new masters of the land had taken her rifle away. And now the winds had begun to blow and the leaves had fallen. She had been gathering mushrooms all along, talking herself into one more expedition into the woods. But the season was over. She had been trying to dry and save the mushrooms for another day, but they had melted in her mouth one by one.

Her neighbors, those among the women from the village who dared to visit their former “mistress,” taught her things she had failed to learn in her fancy Smolny Institute. It was how to make nettle soup, or to set traps for squirrels and rats, or to collect acorns, grind them down, and boil them into gruel.

But the inevitable Russian winter was bound to bring all such last-ditch efforts to an end. If she had managed to gather wood before, she no longer has the strength. And if all she needs to do for water now is step out and scoop up some snow, the effort is beyond her. The day Kashtanka didn’t wake up, she sketched her last sketch: one horizontal line across the middle of the page. Whether it was intended to draw a boundary between the white of the sky and the white of the earth in the wintery Russian landscape, or square accounts between life and death on some last balance sheet remains unanswered.

Well, my dear Chloe and Astrid, you will find pictures of the women who mothered me on my book shelves. To them I owe the life lessons of courage, intelligence, and love. The picture of the grandmother whose life and death I tried to recreate remains missing. But I hope that her presence will remain among us because questions of life and death never leave us. What kind of world is it where people can be left to starve to death? If we still don’t know the answers, I just wanted to raise the question.