Calligraphy Lesson Read Free Page B

life can you truly teach anything of any significance.
    I was stunned to see her lying in the coffin with an Orthodox chaplet on her forehead. I don’t know where it came from, Mum was anything but a church person. She was a completely sincere non-believer. That’s how she’d been brought up. So when I was born she didn’t want me christened. And not because she feared repercussions—at the beginning of sixty-one, when Stalin still lay in the Mausoleum, she was the school’s Party organiser. She just genuinely couldn’t understand: what would be the point? Grandma had me christened on the sly at the church in Udelnaya, where we spent the summer at our dacha.
    Even as a child, it was clear to me that church was a place for uneducated grannies, like my own, with three years of parochial school under her belt.
    Later I thought that the old go to church because they fear death more than the young. And I didn’t yet know that, on the contrary, it is the young who have the greater fear.
    It was only after Mum passed away that I sensed acutely how essential it is for close people to engage in one all-important conversation. Usually that conversation gets put off—it isn’t easy to start talking about the things that matter most over breakfast or somewhere in the metro. Something always gets in the way. I needed to ask Mum for forgiveness, but in all those years I never did manage to. When I began writing The Taking of Izmail , I thought it a novel about history, about the nation, about destiny, about the word, but it turned out to be that very conversation.
    Most likely, such a conversation cannot take place during life in any case. It’s vital that it should come about, but what matter whether it happens before or after the end? The important thing is that she heard me and forgave me.
    Between operations, during the time she had away from the hospitals, Mum would sort out her lifetime’s worth of photographs. She asked me to buy some albums and glued the photos into them, annotating each one with the names of the people it featured, and sometimes she’d write stories associated with these people into the margins. The result was a family archive—for the grandchildren.
    After her death I took the albums over to mine. And when I was leaving for Switzerland, I left them all with my brother. The albums were stored in his house near Moscow.
    The house was burnt down. All our photographs were destroyed.
    All I have left is a handful of childhood snaps.
    One of them, a picture of me, was taken, probably by my father, while we were still living in Presnia, though we moved to Matveyeskaya that same year. I’m in year four. I’m wearing an overcoat with a half-belt that’sout of the camera’s view. I remember that overcoat perfectly—it was a hand-me-down from my brother. I had to wear all his hand-me-downs. But here’s why the overcoat has stuck in my mind. Mum would often tell this story. It’s very short.
    To get to school from Matveyevskaya we’d take the no. 77 bus to Dorogomilovskaya Street, where we changed to an Arbat-bound trolleybus, or alternatively we could take the same bus in the other direction to the railway station, and then on to Kievsky Station. That morning we went to the station. The first snow had fallen during the night. Thousands of feet had trampled the platform into a skating rink. When the train pulled in everyone dashed for the doors. You had to storm the already overflowing carriages, squeeze yourself into the jam-packed vestibules. Between the edge of the platform and the door was an enormous gap. I slipped and was about to fall headlong into it. Thankfully, Mum held me back by the half-belt.
    That, essentially, is the whole story—nothing extraordinary. But this incident held such significance for Mum that she continued to recall it even on the eve of death. She’d smile and whisper just audibly—she’d lost