Matryoshka Read online

  MATRYOSHKA

  Also by Katherine Johnson

  Pescador’s Wake

  The Better Son

  MATRYOSHKA

  KATHERINE JOHNSON

  First published in 2018 by Ventura Press

  PO Box 780, Edgecliff NSW 2027 Australia

  www.venturapress.com.au

  Copyright © Katherine Johnson 2018

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any other information storage retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  Extract from ‘Study of Holocaust survivors finds trauma passed on to children’s genes’ by Helen Thompson, The Guardian, 22 August 2015, © Helen Thompson 2015. Reproduced courtesy of Guardian News & Media Ltd.

  Extract from Pakistan bombing incident summary of 1 January 2014 from the Global Terrorism Database © 2009–2017, University of Maryland, National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism. Reprinted by permission of University of Maryland.

  Extract from ‘Mother Who Gave Me Life’ from Selected Poems by Gwen Harwood © John Harwood 2001. First published by Halcyon Press 2001. Reprinted by permission of Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd.

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  ISBN: 978-1-925384-63-5 (paperback)

  ISBN: 978-1-925384-64-2 (ebook)

  Book cover and internal design by Alissa Dinallo

  Supported by

  This project was assisted through Arts Tasmania by the Minister for the Arts.

  This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body.

  For my daughter, my mother and in memory of my grandmothers

  The matryoshka, or Russian nesting doll, has been used as a toy in Russia since the 1890s. A symbol of motherhood, the hand-painted dolls are commonly carved from birch trees throughout the former Soviet Union. They are also referred to as babushka dolls, babushka being the Russian word for grandmother.

  Mother Who Gave Me Life

  Mother who gave me life

  I think of women bearing

  women. Forgive me the wisdom

  I would not learn from you.

  … anguish of seasons burning

  backward in time to those other

  bodies, your mother, and hers

  and beyond …

  Gwen Harwood, 2001

  My grandmother’s life story comes to me in staccato flashes, for she refused to tell me many of the details, perhaps even the most important ones.

  I imagine her stepping off the ship and onto Australian soil. She wears a tailored knee-length skirt, a cream-coloured blouse with a brooch at her neck and a long woollen coat. The coat blows open; she is pregnant. My grandfather holds her hand, his long piano-playing fingers trembling slightly. He wears a faded suit. Brown. They have between them a small suitcase, which he carries. My grandmother holds only a hat, clutching it against her so it is not taken by the wind. I see her, my babushka, cradling her round belly and smiling at her husband.

  ‘Australia, Nina,’ he says, shaking his head in disbelief that they are finally here, four years after the war ended.

  Her hair blows in the Sydney wind. The salty breeze carries voices of the crowd that has gathered to stare, but Nina doesn’t yet speak English, so is at a loss to understand. Does she spend a night in the sparkling blue-water port, or does she immediately board another ship and cross the strait’s jagged seas to Tasmania? Then, what? A migrant camp? A car or bus, then a horse and cart up to the highlands and the hydroelectric dam builders’ huts? Or did they take a car all the way, beyond the snowline? I am not sure. She did not tell, and I did not think to ask.

  I imagine my grandparents in Tasmania’s high country, huddled in a small cottage made of oiled timber and heated by a woodstove, the sharp, clean smell of burning eucalyptus singeing the dry air.

  Some time later, my mother is born. (At the Hydro settlement?) In the months that follow, she sits on my grandmother’s knee and several Hydro families crowd together, cooing at her. My mother smiles back. Nina said there was a time when my mother smiled a lot. There is the smell of cabbage and soup. Laughter and Russian language. Polish, Lithuanian and Hungarian also. A big displaced European family in the Tasmanian highlands, all on migrant workers’ contracts. The men drink homemade spirits late into the night and tell stories in their mother tongues. My father plays on a rickety upright piano somehow hauled there. Were there fights? Probably, given all that European history thrown together in the Tasmanian wilderness.

  Then, there she is, my beautiful grandmother, leaving for Hobart and the cottage at the foot of Mt Wellington. My grandfather is staying on at the Hydro while she journeys down to the city for my mother. She wants Helena to have a good education and choices. Freedom. I see my grandparents’ hands letting go, the mist thick around them because they are in the clouds. Soon my grandfather will have served out his contract and earned enough money to join his wife. She did not come to Tasmania to be alone.

  There’s a Russian proverb that says The fall of a leaf is a whisper to the living. So, whisper to me, Nina, now that you are gone. Whisper to me. I need your guidance. Tell me a story that makes sense of it all so that I can put all the pieces of the nesting doll that you gave me back together and, one day, tell this story to Ellie, my daughter, your great-granddaughter. For isn’t that what we do in life? Tell ourselves stories? Then retell them at day’s end to our children and grandchildren, so that they will learn and pass down the version we want remembered? One day I will give Ellie the matryoshka, but not yet.

  SUMMER

  1

  My grandmother was the strongest woman I knew, stoic to a fault. I only once saw her cry, and only then because she didn’t know I was watching. She was delirious from a bout of pneumonia that she had ignored for too long, and I had returned to Hobart to be by her feverish side. Nina had refused my mother’s offer of help, as she always did, even though my mother is a doctor and, unlike me, would have been of some use.

  At one point during that visit I witnessed my grandmother wail like a crazed woman and strike out against nothing with her hands and arms. ‘Net, net, net (no, no, no),’ she wept in Russian, her beautiful face contorted with panic. Just: ‘Net, net, net.’

  I didn’t know what memory or vision was causing her such distress, but it seemed more than the baseless rantings of delirium. After she was well again I didn’t mention the episode, deciding she had suppressed those emotions for a reason.

  Now, a month since she died, it is my turn to cry.

  Here at the washing line, my hands holding a skirt that Nina made for my daughter, I am touching my babushka’s ghost. My fingers fold the damp seersucker fabric evenly over the wire. I am guided by rows of tiny blue and white checks, which line up perfectly where the seams of the skirt join. The Brisbane sun is intense on the back of my neck and passes through the fine cotton cloth, exposing my grandmother’s flawless sewing like an X-ray revealing a skeleton. Her journey is mapped out here: a starting stitch, where her needle first landed on a foreign landscape; long stretches of highway, where she picked up speed; intersections, where she had to decide which way to go next; and destinations, where she ran over the same few stitches several times to cement her decision to stop there. I bring the skirt closer and study the handiwork.

  I picture my grandmother bending over the cloth, her silvered hair twisted and pinned into coils against the side of her head to keep it out of her dark eyes. She wets the end of the cotton thread in her mouth to form a point and pierces it through the ne
edle before starting the machine with her foot and guiding the newly sewn fabric on its way with unfaltering attention.

  ‘Every stitch is a stitch of love,’ she would say, and I see the love in each solitary loop with its precise beginning, middle and end.

  How can something so small persist when the person who created it has gone?

  I was at a conference in Malaysia when my mother phoned with the news that Nina had died. I booked an early flight to Tasmania without delivering my research paper.

  At the airport the next day, I received an email from my mother with the attached death notice:

  Nina Barsova died at home, 13 November, aged 86. Remembered by her daughter, Helena, granddaughter, Sara and great-granddaughter, Ellie. A private service to be held at the Russian Orthodox Church, Lenah Valley, 17 November.

  The body of the email read, ‘Your grandmother loved you very much, and so do I.’ The message was characteristically succinct and more overt about her feelings than she is in person, as if writing she loves me might make me believe her.

  I stared at the notice until my eyes stung. Losing Nina hurt more than if my mother had died, I am sure of it.

  I looked out the airport-lounge window at planes leaving and arriving, traversing the planet in hours or a day and thought of how much longer my grandmother’s journey to Tasmania had taken.

  Nina was a large presence in my life, but her funeral would be small. She used to tell me how few people welcomed her to Hobart in the months after she arrived from the Hydro camp, and that those who did were mostly post-war migrants like herself. Not one neighbour brought food or gifts or opened their doors. I still wonder if she misread as coldness or hostility her neighbours’ own grief, for many of them had also lost family members in the war. Or had she wanted to believe the fairytale view of this place and its people, forgetting that the descendants of colonisers have their own terrible histories? The landscape itself seemed to produce feelings of alienation in her. She told me once she’d never liked Australian trees, especially the eucalypts, and thought the country she had fled to looked dead because of them.

  Sitting in the hard-backed airport seat, unaware of my frozen posture, I wondered if I should take Nina’s ashes back to Russia. If the man beside me had not tapped me on the shoulder, I would have missed my flight home.

  I called my mother from the airport in Hobart. She had elected to stay in a hotel and had offered to pay for a room for me, but there was only one place I wanted to be, and I could not understand why she didn’t also want to stay at Nina’s cottage. But then, I didn’t remember her ever sleeping there overnight, not even when I was a child living with my grandmother.

  ‘Dr Barsova,’ she answered.

  I pictured her, still trim, with stylishly cut grey and black hair pushed off her narrow face by black-framed reading glasses perched on her head. The last time I had seen her in person was at my wedding, seven years ago.

  ‘It’s me –’

  ‘Oh, Sara. You’re early. I was expecting a call from the hospital.’ Her words bled forth in a rush before she paused. She sounded nervous. ‘I’m glad it’s you. I’ll be right there; I’m just parked down the street. How was the flight?’

  ‘Good. Thanks.’

  We didn’t kiss each other at the airport. I just piled into the car, which was in a five-minute zone.

  ‘How did Nina die?’ I asked several minutes into the car ride. ‘You said a heart attack, but was it quick?’

  ‘Yes, in her sleep. I phoned her GP when I couldn’t raise her.’ There was a lengthy pause. ‘She wouldn’t have felt anything,’ my mother finally said.

  Why? Just because you don’t? I thought to myself. A lump formed in my throat, and I took a sip of tepid bottled water that I’d carried with me from the flight.

  In Sydney, my mother repairs children’s fragile hearts, and I have long wondered what those children have that I didn’t.

  ‘Ellie is with Ian, I take it?’ she asked.

  I knew my daughter should have been at the funeral, but I had been worried about upsetting her, given everything else.

  ‘Of course. Who else would I leave her with?’ I slowly breathed in and out. ‘I’d like her to have been here, but it didn’t make sense to fly to Brisbane to get her first. Anyway, there’s enough going on in her life …’

  ‘Ian could have brought her, surely.’

  He had offered.

  ‘We’re separating.’ There, I had said it. ‘It’s better like this.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

  ‘We don’t do men well, us women, do we?’ I heard my words as if they were someone else’s.

  ‘Jesus, Sara. I don’t know where to start with you.’ Helena’s voice was clipped with frustration and hurt. I watched her fingers grip the steering wheel. ‘You can be quite cruel, you know that? Your grandfather died in an accident. And I … I did my best. I’m sorry. It was complicated, and I was very young. Too young.’

  ‘And you still won’t tell me who my father is?’

  ‘No, Sara. I won’t.’

  The funeral was as small as I expected and felt strained. Several neighbours attended, including Michael Forster from across the road, although Nina had been far from close to his family. His parents were contemporaries of hers and Nina despised them. She once said that her underpants used to go missing from the clothesline and that she suspected Reginald Forster of taking them, just as she later admitted that she had suspected him of stealing and defacing Helena’s dolls. ‘He was an evil man,’ Nina repeated. ‘His eyes …’ she would begin, and I would remind her that she had told me already of the neighbour’s eyes. I didn’t need to hear it again.

  Michael’s father died in the 1967 bushfires, the year I was born. Their house and everything in it was destroyed, with the exception of a collection of Aboriginal stone tools that Reginald Forster had inherited from his grandparents’ failed homestead in the Tasmanian midlands.

  At the funeral, Michael, though the same age as my mother, looked wan and prematurely stooped, and did not speak to me or Helena at the church. I’d fleetingly seen him at his rebuilt house while I was staying at Nina’s cottage; he didn’t look up as he crossed to his workshop where he has a small picture-framing business. Why do people do that, close their doors to others in life but attend their funeral? Do they have a sudden attack of guilt, and fear that God is watching? But if He is, if God exists, surely He sees the hypocrisy.

  When I was a teenager, Nina told me it served Michael Forster’s father right to have died in the bushfire. After Michael’s mother, Evelyn, died, Nina surprised me a second time by saying that she had been ‘a racist cow’. ‘She called me a communist!’ Nina said. I had never heard my grandmother speak like this of anyone and the memory of the shock of it almost made me laugh there in the church where all I wanted to do was cry but didn’t.

  There were several others at the service, people I didn’t know; my mother said they were from Nina’s Hydro days. The priest spoke frequently in Russian, a language understood only by himself and a very old man who sat nodding in a wheelchair in the aisle. And then my grandmother was gone from this world, taken in the back of the hearse to the cemetery. I did not follow it.

  Leaving my daughter’s skirt drying on the clothesline, I think of Nina’s ashes blowing amid the timeless wilderness of Mount Wellington, which is where my mother and I decided she would prefer to be. Silently, we scattered her remains at the summit from where dolerite columns plummet to the ground and resemble giant organ pipes. I imagine the fragments of her blending with the ancient dirt and the eroded rock of the mountain face.

  I shut my eyes and ask Nina to send me a sign. I suspect even the hardest cynic has tried this after losing a loved one; not openly, but perhaps in the solitary, dreamy darkness of night when one realm might nudge secretly against another, and the strange and inexplicable seem somehow possible. I need to know she is still out there, somewhere.

  But I am alone, stifled by the sea
ring heat of the Queensland sun and the heavy scent of mango sap. Oversexed crickets are rubbing their legs together raucously in unmown grass, drowning out all other sound. A mirage of summer air levitates above the bitumen street that frames our suburban block, hemming me in.

  ‘Remember the good things,’ my grandmother would say as she patted me on the shoulder, twice. I wish I knew more about how she endured grief in her life.

  Maybe she decided that not all memories were helpful. She was a survivor. She buried her history and moved on. And if she could, perhaps so should I. Given all that she must have witnessed in the war, and then the sudden death at the Hydro lake of my grandfather, who was crushed by a falling ancient tree, I hardly feel justified in mourning my own losses.

  Grandmothers are destined to die, and Ian and I have not been separated by the hand of God, but by choice – even if it was just Ian’s choice, not mine or Ellie’s.

  Besides, we are not divorced. There’s a chance we will sort things out. Christmas is in less than a fortnight. Good things happen at Christmas.

  Ellie runs towards me, collides with my legs and squeezes them tight in her best impression of one of the local fruit bats finding its roost in the dead of night.

  In a few hours the sky will be a mass of dark, flapping shadows as hundreds of bats return to their upside-down colony in the Moreton Bay fig tree that overhangs the Brisbane River, just below our weatherboard Queenslander built high on stilts to escape floods and catch cooling breezes. As my daughter closes her eyes tonight, the bats’ high-pitched chatter will be her bedtime story.

  I crouch and smell her hair, mopping up my tears on her collar before she notices them. Unlike Nina, and Helena, I’m not good at containing my emotions. I stroke Ellie’s head and the skin on the back of my hand appears old against the youthful sheen of her dark hair. She pulls back and looks at me.