An Essay of Forgetting

No one lies like an eye witness

– Russian Proverb

On one document, a reference written in German in 1948, he is Johannes Mähl. On another deeply yellowed page, I can’t read the Cyrillic, but my grandmother says he’s Ivan “Vanya” Myahla. On the last, his naturalisation papers, beneath the seal and the coat of arms, John-Paul Mahl.

Some days the story went like this. “We’d just sit there in the dark and wait for the noise to end.” He’s talking about the bomb shelters in Bremen. Always the bomb shelters in Bremen. Only some days it went another way. He’s above the ground now, his wife and four children below. And he doesn’t mind the English and American bombs because they give him a chance to find food. “In the broken windows,” he’ll say, “you’ve never seen such apples.” And broken glass. The story would also go like this. They’re beneath the ground. Only this time he takes his accordion from its felt-lined case. He begins to play, slow at first, but building in speed as the bombs begin. He starts to dance, spinning with the music through the dark. There is clapping now, a woman starts to sing. He can hear his wife as she stands and unwraps the blanket. “All morning, picking glass out of the flour.” He pauses. “The dumplings smelled of pork fat.” As if it was the food that made him smile.

I can speak with no certainty about this. And although it’s taken me thirty years, I’ve given up caring. Because the thing is, I don’t like the (semi-?) (auto-?) biographical novels written by second generation Australians. I don’t trust their claims to truth. Johannes-Ivan-John-Paul Mähl-Myahla-Mahl was my grandfather (and one of the children in that bomb shelter in northern Germany was my mother). He witnessed the events described—he was, in his own mind at least, their most active participant. And he told me about them. And I believed him. I believe him. He told me many times. He was Russian, after all. Or Ukrainian. Or was that volksdeutsche? His mother, Mariza Gläser, was born in Graz, a city in what was called at the time Austria-Hungary. His father was born in 1872 in Oberpalin, Estonia. And John-Paul first saw daylight in November 1915 in Kiev, capital of the Ukraine but historically (if you’ll forgive the generalisation) Russian in all but name, and fitfully, language.

He told me because he had been there (and I had not) and in the instant that he saw he was already starting to forget. It wasn’t a character flaw. Such forgetting is central to us all. Because this is what stories are. As Joseph Brodsky has said in another context, they creak like boards laid over a chasm.¹

II

I believe forgetting can be an art. I would like to say I forgot my family’s past. It would make my task (and my life) so much easier. But I didn’t forget my family’s past, I was ignorant of it. And this ignorance bothered me. Not in itself, mind you. It wasn’t as if they had all died before I had a chance to talk to them. No, I would see my mother every day, and my grandparents almost as often, and not once did I ask them a single question about the past. To put it more precisely, then: it wasn’t my ignorance that bothered me, it was the fact I wasn’t bothered. I grew up in what in Cessnock at the time was an exotic family, and I couldn’t give a stuff.

It came to me some time in high school. I couldn’t work it out then, but I think I can understand a little now of what was going on. As an adolescent, I hated the child I had been. I could have sympathised with him if he had failed to learn his mother’s tongue (how often had I been told what a “hard” language Russian was?), but he didn’t fail because he didn’t even try. It was the absence of desire I could never forgive. And though I couldn’t put it into words, I knew that it had something to do with cowardice, a fear of something too large (and dark) to grasp. A fear of being swamped.

Now, as I write, I’m not so sure. Perhaps there was something heroic in my desire not to know, or at least something positive. And how could I know that my grandfather might have conspired in this ignorance, happy, for his own reasons, that I showed no inclination to push beyond what he had given? Because the truth is, the few stories I had were enough. During the first twelve years of my life I knew almost nothing about the Ukraine and while, on the surface at least, I cared little for its actuality, as a fabled place it became for me the source of almost all my romance. I understand now that it was precisely because I knew so little that this could be so.

Like almost all second generation Australians, I lived in two worlds as a child. And somehow that child sensed intuitively that it was essential to avoid actual knowledge; that by knowing just a little, not only was he able to establish his own sense of self, he could also, and more importantly, make himself however he wanted. Without knowledge, without language, there was no deceit, and certainly no self-consciousness: it was the easiest thing in the world to see the forests of the Ukraine in the backyards of Cessnock and Nelson Bay.

III

I remember bits, fragments, slivers.

He’s sitting across the table from me. It’s how we always sit. He’s drinking beer from the bottle. And my grandmother is behind him, washing dishes in the kitchen.

In my memory this arrangement is always stronger than anything he will say. The talk is its residue, like light from a constellation.

But it isn’t only in memory. It was exactly the same at the time.

—

How do you puzzle together a life, part of which your grand-parents wanted you to know, and part of which they didn’t? How do you build a puzzle with only half of each piece in your hand?

According to my grandfather, it is possible to learn English from American films. (My grandmother would later learn the same, in Australia in the Fifties, transcribing recipes from her neighbours’ Women’s Weeklys.) German was his mother tongue, Ukrainian his birthright, and Russian was the language he was taught at school (with a few minor political interruptions). There’s no doubt his facility with languages enabled him to survive a war in which the enemy kept changing shape. Still, English came to him inadvertently. But I’ll let him tell the story.

While he talks my grandmother lifts her head occasionally and looks at his back. She moves her lips but she does not speak.

He was 24 in 1939. He lived around the corner from a cinema the NKVD had built exclusively for its officers.

“It was easy enough. I was an electrician after all.” He laughs a lot while he talks. And he looks at me all the time, like he wants to make sure I’m in no doubt he has nothing to hide. “One night I just cut the power to the whole building.” “You had a plan?” I say to him. He looks behind him at my grandmother. “We all knew they ate well in there. It was a foolish thing. But sometimes you don’t think.”

I’ve forgotten what happened next. But somehow, that same night, he was engaged to find and repair the fault. His price? A bargain really. He would restore the power and oversee all things electrical if his wife and family might be permitted to sit at the back of the cinema each night and partake (a little) of the food that remained. “They had cakes,” my grandmother told me years later, “with icing and real cream.”

It’s an improbable story. And yet, even without my grand-father’s gaze, I believe it still. While God knows how many of his countrymen had died in the famines and Gulags, until the arrival of the Germans in 1941, he watched American films with his family and survived (and stole enough to help others survive) on the privileges of the despised Commissariat of Internal Affairs. It was a wonderful irony for a Nationalist, an enemy of the people you might say. But he doesn’t want to talk about that.

He was a big man. His shoulders, arms and chest were big with work. His body gave to everything he did a certain scale. He didn’t just sit in a chair, he loomed. And when he laughed, even his laughter was large. I’m not talking about the natural aggrandisements of memory here. He’s looming across the table from me now, looking over his shoulder and laughing all the time. Unlike me though, he has no desire to talk about the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists, its split at the outbreak of World War II, and its ultimate betrayal at the hands of the Germans. It’s the films that interest him. He loved the films—even though he can’t remember a single title. (I like to think of him, in the dark, the officers of Internal Affairs all around, not quite understanding what was going on, but marvelling all the same, at Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, say, or Hawks’ Only Angels Have Wings, or John Ford’s classic western, Stagecoach. There are worse ways to learn a language.)

In Australia, forty years after that time, it was still the same. He couldn’t miss a film. Every weekend, it was like a religious ritual, and his delight remained undiminished, as if, on each new occasion, he was seeing film for the first time. It was strange, and a little unnerving, to watch him, a big man with the face of a child.

This is how he put it when I wanted him to tell me about the time before the NKVD came into his life, his life outside the cinema. “Looking at the screen for three hours, when I turned on the lights and walked outside, everyone I saw looked small, the street was like a doll’s house.” He stopped laughing then, though at the time I thought it was the funniest part. It was comfortable in the dark, he’d say, my grandmother’s arm around his shoulders and her leg warm against his own, like dreaming without having to go to sleep. “I still can’t work out if what I liked best was the scale of things, seeing people so big, on the screen I mean, or later, standing outside, and feeling the beautiful smallness.”

—

It’s not that I can’t give life to his voice. (He talks to me all the time in my head.) It’s not even that he’s lying. After all, as Brodsky has said, lies have an “almost-ness” which sharpens the outline of truth.² The real problem is simple: he’s just not telling me everything. It’s got nothing to do with failure of speech. When I think of him, he’s always talking; he was terrifyingly articulate, with all the eloquence of an actor whose mask is language itself. He spoke with ease and yet I knew (I don’t know how) of the silence that lay behind what he said, like the body of which his words were the shadow. He didn’t have to mythologise himself—my desire to do the job for him was so strong it needed no prompting. Yet I sensed the gaps, I listened to them, for I could never shake the intimation entirely, even in the midst of my romance, that I had to get behind the mask of his voice, the stories rehearsed like a statement for the police.

There were no police or courts for his kind of trouble, however, and even if there were, they wouldn’t have been interested in him. Civil absolution was out of the question then, and God was too far away. I was all he had. And he found, in me, what I think he wanted: a way of preparing and forestalling judgement; of interrogation by the future in the present. I think he loved my myth-making (even as it contributed to his guilt), but he gave me just enough to make me doubt; he allowed me to sense the silence. Because he knew that in my imagination, even if I would later punish him for crimes he did not commit, I would also, if only by the laws of chance, get him finally for one he did. That the silence, like a childhood trauma, would rise and find a voice.

IV

What does a civilian have to do in order to survive a war? A war in which (as much as such things can be counted) civilians died more than soldiers, and Ukrainian civilians died more than any other civilian population in Europe?³

This is the myth I love.

In the years 1941-1945, my grandfather and grandmother, together with their four children (the oldest of whom was nine at war’s end), walked from Kiev to Naples. A young man and woman carried their four children through the war’s greatest carnage and somehow managed to survive. My grandfather was thirty by the time it ended, four years younger than I am now.

The evidence is all circumstantial, of course—he wasn’t the kind of man to talk about such things—but in these conditions an individual would almost certainly have to do a few nasty things.

He set it out like this. I’m quoting him from memory. I have no transcripts from which to draw. He was trying to explain something else, why he felt such repugnance for Russian communism, I think. But I knew that he was talking about himself.

“You can’t fight a war without suspending civil values. Yet you always come back to judging it by civilian law. Because deep down you can’t accept that war proves the failure of law. The laws we return to after war are like the Emperor’s new clothes.”

I see him again, hunched over the table, his forehead clenched like a fist, punishing himself for crimes he didn’t commit. Because even in war, if you kill a man, or steal from his home, you can’t get past those civil values, you can’t, by will, put your conscience to sleep, or make it turn a blind eye. Only totalitarianism was capable of such moral alchemy, and totalitarianism he despised.

“The supposed reason for armies is to defend the values (of freedom?) which by their very nature are opposed to armies and which the armies by their very existence deny. But if you get to the bottom of it, you see it’s the opposite: that civilian values exist really to defend the armies which by their very nature cannot tolerate these values if they are to survive. I’m not just talking about Russia now. At its root, any civil society is based on the principle of justifying the military, its own defense, which renders it already non-existent.”

If he thought of himself as anything, it was as a humanist. But a humanist, for him, was also a pragmatist. Human beings are not perfect. If, as he believed, all utopias are based on ideals of human perfectibility, they must, as a consequence, be anti-human. Only thinking that recognises human failure is humanist. And only systems based on a recognition of this thinking are human. I can still hear his voice. “Most of us live our lives only one step behind failure.”

—

It’s not that I think my grandfather did abominable things. In some ways that would be easier to deal with; to demonise him, or, as some have done, perversely, to indulge in the horror and enlarge myself through my link to the seminal atrocities of this century. In my case, my grandfather lied, stole, and may have killed, man to man. He almost certainly collaborated, if that word has any meaning for a Ukrainian (remember, he spoke Russian, German and American like a native), and changed his spots as often as he changed his name. All of them no more than crimes of survival, duties, you might say, to keep a family alive in a world turned upside-down. But they nag at me still, untested by history though I am, and painfully aware that I have no right to judge, because I thought of him as perfect, a hero. And the reality is he was just a man.

V

I’ve been thinking about a story, a race between a snail and a tortoise to see who can run the slowest. But for some reason I keep seeing it in terms of smallness. My grandfather wanted to escape size once and for all, to get away from countries that seemed forever wanting to grow, as if identity was stronger the longer a border became; as if largeness was not a physical quality at all, but metaphysical, like the soul. I think he came to see islands as a kind of victory. It must have been inside his head in the Red Cross camp in Naples when they were offering him places to go.

Stalin’s envoys were calling him back home, of course. But even if he hadn’t known what they were up to, he couldn’t return. Somewhere between Kiev and Naples his longing died. He realised there was no home. Not physically. Not mentally. He’d killed it in his head.

How does a war end? When does a person die? How much of his life is the survivor obliged to pass on to his children, before (and after) his death? And what are we to do with that life—and our strange vicarious guilt?

We’re taught it’s essential that we remember. “Lest we forget,” we are told. But how can you forget what you never had a chance to remember? Memories you never had? How can you forget experiences that are not your own? Because this is what the injunction boils down to in the end: “Remember the memories of somebody else.”

—

My family arrived in Melbourne on September 14, 1949. Their ship was the Dundalk Bay, Official Number 180089, of Bay Line Ltd, Belfast. The master’s name was W.W. Quaite. The ship had a net weight of 4857^.38 tons, and weighed 7104^.51 tons when it sailed into Port Phillip Bay. You can see the six of them on the passenger list—Johann, Alexandra, Heinrich, Nelly, Valentina (my mother) and Albert—wedged between what remained of the Maciulis family of Lithuania and the Manczak family of Poland. They travelled 3rd class. Germany was the country of their last permanent residence, they were of alien nationality, and at the end of the line, next to each of their names, Australia is listed as the Country of Intended Future Permanent Residence.

In the four years between the war’s end and their arrival in Australia, I have no idea how they lived or what happened to them.

VI

A year ago, driving from Sydney to the Blue Mountains, I was listening to a tape of Ukrainian folk music my grandmother had recorded for me. My wife was sitting beside me in the car and we were talking about a concert we had been to the night before. The performers were an English folk trio—father, mother and daughter—and in one of their songs, while the daughter sang at the front of the stage, her father stood behind her, eyes closed, playing the mandolin and silently mouthing the words while he played. It was a wonderful moment of blind intimacy, of the beauty and joy of transmission.

One of my earliest memories is of my grandfather squatting behind me, trying vainly to teach me how to play his accordion. The instrument was too heavy for me even to lift off the floor, but I have no memory of its weight. All I can remember is the press of his chest against my back and the scrape of the bellows on my stomach. He’d circled his arms around my sides, and passing his wrists through the instument’s leather straps, held his hands on top of my own, pressing my fingers down hard against the hard buttons, and opening and closing my arms as if I was a bellows as well. Pressed tight between chest and bellows, it felt like the music was coming out of myself.

Ukrainian folk music, like its Russian counterpart (the distinction is as slippery as the confluence of river and sea), has an enormous repertory of wild and exuberant drinking songs. But although I can remember my grandfather dancing me around the room, my mother-of-pearl arms going in and out like the gaudy wings of a bird, when I think of the music now it is as a bass music, with voices that seem to rumble rather than sing and melodies that sound as if they have had to rise up from beneath the ground. Somehow my image of the music has changed and set so hard even memory can’t shake it. And the tape my grandmother made for me simply reinforced my view. There were no voices, but the balalaikas and banduras were slow and mournful, the accordion wailing like a dirge beneath them.

For some reason I felt an overwhelming compulsion to apologise for the music to my wife. Though she hadn’t complained, I felt as if I was somehow to blame for the terrible sadness. And the silence the music had introduced between us. But before I had a chance to speak, something strange happened. My grandfather’s voice rose out of the music like its ghost. He was there in the car. I pulled over to the side of the road. By this time the voice had stopped. It could only have lasted about thirty seconds. And now that it had gone, I began to calm down. It wasn’t until the music began again, however, that I realised what had happened. Because it was only when the music began again that I realised it had stopped. My grandfather had come from the tape.

The talk of ghosts seems foolish now. But in the car, on that day, I felt his touch. My wife rewound the tape. And it was there again, speaking the same words. I don’t know how many times we played it over, but each time (though I hoped) it was the same. Worse than a ghost, because it cheated me of him at the very moment it seemed to give him to me.

For a couple of weeks I couldn’t work out how he had managed to get onto the tape. Then I remembered. Twelve years ago, a month before I left to take up a scholarship in England, I taped a conversation. He was very sick at the time. We waited until my grandmother went out one afternoon to visit Polish friends. We wanted to speak candidly and she did not want him to speak to me of the past. But my grandmother returned before we had finished. She played the tape to herself and would not let me take it when I left. I forgot that afternoon twelve years ago. But it’s clear now what happened. My grandmother censored our conversation with a record of “authentic” folk music played by a state-authorised folk ensemble. But somehow, perhaps when she was changing sides, a fragment of my grandfather escaped burial and rose up out of its musical grave in my car.

The music was an embodiment of how the Soviet State wanted to be seen. It was also, and this is the paradox, an embodiment of how my grandmother wanted her country to be viewed by me. That was twelve years ago. She talks openly of the past now and would allow my grandfather to do the same.

VII

My grandfather died while I was living in Cambridge. This is what remains (the ruin, you might say) of his voice on the tape.

 “Oh,” he said, “Oh, I can’t see why.” I said, “Good…” So I ring them up. I said, “Listen, you got any…tucker left?” “Oh,” he said, “Yes, we…Every day we have s..so much left, because so many…Germans not there where their dinner is, because they might be miles and miles away, see, but they don’t know and they cooking a bit more.” So I said, “I appoint so many men, and they come…What time they come?” He say, “Well, tell them to come half-past-one. That’s when the dinner finish. What’s left, we give it to your people to eat.” So…then I…

I’ve tried, I don’t know how many times, to remember the rest of this story, how it started and how it finished. If he meant anything to me at all then surely I could accomplish this one simple thing. But every day I feel it more as a measure of how much I have lost of him already, a betrayal of his memory. Because it’s like his life really. I had the middle, but I missed the beginning and the end.

—

Loss, then, but not loss alone. Nothing brings a person more to life than his voice. In literature we say that characters live in their voices, but it’s true beyond the page as well. I have many photographs of my grandfather. But a photograph is a kind of living death—the subject is buried irretrievably in that moment. My photographs keep my memory alive but they do not raise my grandfather. The thirty seconds of tape are a different story. He was talking, his voice was there in the car with us. He could repeat the words a hundred times over and still be there. Unlike the image, the voice comes from inside, and it pierces us like an arrow.

When I stopped the tape and started the car again I felt a sudden nostalgia. It was the music this time (though it wasn’t there, in the music, until after I had heard the voice). It’s odd, this nostalgia for a culture and a place of which we were never a part. (Yet the older I get, the more nostalgic I feel for the Ukraine.) It’s like having a memory of something you don’t know. To feel the emotion, but miss its source. Even when he was alive, what interested me most about my grandfather was his memories. But it wasn’t just me. As with most migrants, his memories were what interested him most about himself. Memories were his currency—it was how he defined himself—and he dealt in them as a means of filling in the temporal emptiness of his new place. I can see this in the fragment of his voice. How nostalgia works best in the gap between the idea we have of ourselves and what is there.

I was talking to my wife last night about the way my mother used to make blintzes. She told me, smiling, that even if she were to repeat exactly my mother’s every movement, her blintzes would not be the same. When I asked why, she said: “It’s impossible to compete with the past.”

VIII

My voice, too, is there in the tape. It doesn’t matter now what I said. But what I experience, when I hear my own voice, in dialogue still, is a kind of resurrection. I (who am not dead) am talking to him (who is). Not a transcendence of time; rather, its confusion.

I am there, on the tape, talking to my grandfather as I cannot talk to him now. But the pathos I feel has nothing to do with this impossibility. What pierces me is memory. I have the tape, I can play it as many times as I like, but no matter how many times I play it I can’t remember its moment, I can’t bring it back inside myself.

This is the worst kind of forgetting. Because it prefigures death; the death already in life, immanent in each moment of passing time. And no matter how determined I might be to live in the present (to savour its presence), I know that in a moment it will be gone and I will never be able to bring it back.

Viewed in this light, Roland Barthes’ observation that cameras are “clocks for seeing” takes on an added poignancy. Barthes attributes the invention of photography, not to the painters, but to the chemists who made it possible to recover and print directly the luminous rays emitted by people and objects. He writes:

The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here…A sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze: light, though impalpable, is here a carnal medium, a skin I share with anyone who has been photographed.⁴

I am not trying to confuse tape and photograph here, but the umbilical cord Barthes finds in emanations of light is almost the same connection I feel to the sound waves which issued from my grandfather’s throat. “Almost”, a terrible word that. The photograph does not call up the past. The voice does. But it does so only to confirm its death.

IX

My grandfather never returned to the Ukraine. When I travelled to Kiev, in the summer of 1985, my photographs showed him a city he no longer knew. In the years before he left, the early years of the war, he had already begun refracting it through the prism of memory, and his letters now made clear what I should have seen: that he had kept the old city alive in his head the way a museum will preserve an ancient relic. My photographs destroyed Kiev (for him) as effectively as the Germans. What I didn’t realise at the time was how common this experience had become. As a result of the massive diaspora brought on by the war European nations could now view their own pasts, not as historical abstractions, but as living organisms, only flourishing within the borders of some other nation.

Kiev, August 9, 1985

Is it a peculiarly Australian experience that our personal heritage and sense of identity includes a place and a history not really our own, not really accessible to us? The fact that our sense of self-discovery and self-realisation takes place in foreign lands is one of the rich and complex ironies of being Australian…

In my own lofty and naïve way I thought of myself as experiencing in Kiev what my family experienced in Melbourne almost forty years before. The clash between their idea of Australia and the reality of what they saw seemed to me then no more than a reversal of my own tiny journey. What fascinates me now, however, cannot be reduced simply (and simple-mindedly) to questions of identity. My grandfather told me the stories yet I remain as far as ever from understanding how he managed to connect a past like his to Australia (and how Australia changed as a result). It’s as if the disjunction between the reality and the romance with which I view this coupling is built in from the start. Why else do I always come back to this impossible image of him, guitar in one hand, accordion in the other, smelling, all at once, of vodka and cabbage and dried honey cake, a piece of Eastern Europe in Cessnock’s own backyard, harmlessly exotic, whom the townspeople love (as I do) like a tiger in a cage?

In Australia, in towns and suburbs everywhere, they live with their migrated pasts, just far enough beneath the surface.

X

The telegram came in January, 1988. Ring home, my father wrote. I knew what had happened. I had no idea of the mechanics, but I knew that he was dead. Outside, it had been snowing on and off for two weeks. In the phone box on the corner of my street the phone was so cold I had to stretch my jumper over my hand to pick it up.

I hadn’t enjoyed my time in Cambridge. It was like there was something wrong inside myself. I found myself translating all the time, but without a change of language. Everything would have been so much easier, I thought, if they’d only spoken something other than English. I wrote to him about this and he replied that many people feel foreign in their own language.

He died in a car accident. Survived famine, prison, occupation, war, migration, heart surgery, to die somewhere on the road between Williamtown and Nelson Bay. I laughed when my father told me. Holding the phone, 12,000 miles away, I could see only that he’d done it again. Eluded me even in death. It was a way of hiding, I know, of turning my guilt into an accusation, but he had this way of making me see the unreality of the real. In the following days I would need the certainty of his dead body, but as I talked to my father all I could see was that he had died, just like he survived, somewhere else. I knew the way my mind worked: without his body I would continue to believe he was still alive. His stories had worked on me in such a way that even when I had left childhood behind I still believed he couldn’t die. He had cheated death all my life in his stories. I should have realised sooner he would cheat me by dying in a story not his own.

My mortality began at that moment. As my father and then my mother and then my sister began to talk and I continued to drop pound coins into the phone, I found myself looking back to a time that seemed already so long ago, a golden age, though it might only have been yesterday, when death was just a word.

But it wasn’t just the realisation that I had believed (if only unconsciously) that as long as he lived I would never die. I experienced my mortality, strangely, as a desire to write. I wanted to write something about him. It seems ironic to me now that I experienced this desire at the very moment I became aware that my source-material had been closed-off, but it was as if two contradictory feelings had taken hold of me at once. If it is in absence that people forget each other, it is also in absence that they remember (and invent).

Nevertheless, the irony remains. I realise now that I could not have written this essay while he was alive. I want more than anything else for him to read it, but only as I know that I could not have written anything as long as he was here to witness.

XI

My grandfather was not speaking metaphorically when he told me he felt like a foreigner in his own language. In Australia, reading Russian made him feel dizzy. The mere sight of the Cyrillic script was enough to give him headspins and he’d say he wanted to be sick. It was a strange experience for a child just beginning to grapple with his own sense of written language. I was still in the grip of my own magic, I suppose—that these markings on the page could hold, like a pianola roll, the sounds of the words I made—but his seemed much stronger, and also more dangerous. Revulsion for a person I could understand, but revulsion for a language exceeded the bounds of what I knew and marked me for life.

I’ve never understood it (perhaps he’d seen his death written in those characters, I don’t know), and living at this point in history, in this democracy, I probably never will. All I can say is that it was the only time I ever went against him. I have no idea why, but from the moment I saw that alphabet, though I tried, I couldn’t feel the same. I romanticised it in secret, I surrendered myself to its form; and though it seems odd to say, I fell in love. It was as if I was made somehow special by my relation to it, different from everyone else at school (the exact difference my mother spent her whole brief school life trying to hide). I used to love imagining how my name would look in those strange characters, the touch of the language against my self. I think this is why I never learned it. It had nothing to do with my grandfather’s revulsion or any sense that at best I knew I could only achieve a kind of mimicry. I wanted the language to remain ineffable. It was, for me, like the mystery of musical composition, or the real name of God.

—

While I saw my own uniqueness as tied to the unfathomable mystery of the Russian language (and longed for a world in which it might resist decipherment, like Egyptian hieroglyphs before the Rosetta Stone), I was not above an interest in the history of the script itself. Behind my grandfather’s back I read the story of the language as if palaeography was “A Boy’s Own Adventure”. Two Greek brothers from Thessalonica, one called Constantine (who on his deathbed took the monastic name Cyril), the other Methodius, were sent by the Byzantine Emperor Michael III as missionaries to the Great Moravian Principality, after the death of Charlemagne in the ninth century. They were sent at the request of Rostislav, the Principality’s ruler, to preach Christianity to the local population in its mother tongue. Rostislav’s purpose, unknown to the monks, was entirely political: he hoped to neutralise the influence of the German church (which used Latin) while continuing his own armed struggle against the Germans. The brothers couldn’t know it at the time, but their mission proved to be one of the most important events in the cultural history of the whole Slavic world.

There is some dispute among language historians as to whether the Cyrillic alphabet preceded the Glagolitic (preserved nowadays only in the liturgy of the Roman Catholic Croats), and whether or not Cyril was the “inventor” of both alphabets. What cannot be doubted is Cyril’s remarkable linguistic talent: allowing for inevitable accretions and amendments, the alphabetic system he created survives to this day as the basis of modern Russian, Ukrainian, Serbian, and Bulgarian orthography. Unlike almost every other alphabet, therefore, the origins of Cyrillic are not only known, they can be attributed to a single person.

It was enough for me simply to look at the script. There, without any knowledge of what the characters might mean or how they might sound, I saw, as if in a sketch-book, an idea of myself. There were no pictures, of course, the characters were even more abstract than those of my own alphabet, and yet (perhaps because of this), by staring at them long enough, I began to see Russia.

It might have been as if through the wrong end of a telescope, but it was my first experience of foreignness, I think. The Cyrillic alphabet evoked Russia for me as a child in a way that vodka, or music, or incense, or even the spoken language could not. Those dense, puzzling, impenetrable letters were somehow what I felt Russia was. It was a peasant alphabet, an alphabet of vast forested spaces and terrible winters, a primitive storehouse of cruelty, barbarity and mysticism. The romance came from my grandfather, of course, but at the time it seemed to me to be there in the script itself, the way that Turner’s paintings seem suffused with light. As I grew older, Cyrillic also became the alphabet of the greatest prose literature in the world. This seemed both paradoxical, and perfectly natural. As if my romanticisation of the script was what it needed to complete itself, like the nostalgia at the heart of the Russian present.

—

It occurs to me, as I write these words, that I am talking about Russia and the Ukraine here as if they are indistinguishable. That I am betraying the distinction my grandfather spent his whole life trying to uphold. What can I say? When I was growing up there were times when it suited me to blur the boundary between the two, when it suited me, that is, to think of myself as Russian; and other times when I would go to the most ludicrously pedantic lengths to make the Ukraine as foreign to Russia as English is to Arabic. And yet it is the Russian language I would have learned.

It occurs to me, as I write these words, that I have never shown the slightest inclination to resolve this contradiction.

My grandfather learned my language but I never learned his. Never learned to speak any other language in fact. For this reason I’ve always loved the sound of my own language in the mouths of those who for a good part of their lives have chewed other words. Talking to Pop was like listening to a foreign language that wasn’t foreign. It was language with all the joy of music. And it was crazy. “What kind of funny language you speaking?” I’d say as a kid when he’d talk to me in English. I still don’t know something as simple as how to spell his name.

XII

The history of the Ukraine presents a succession of swings between the Russian and Ukrainian languages. (That the difference between the two languages is not large might help to explain the almost religious intensity with which it has been maintained.) The period in which my grandfather grew up was different only in the level of its concentration. On December 30, 1922, the first All-Union Congress of the Soviets voted on a plan of federation between the four original soviet socialist republics—Russian, Belorussian, Ukrainian and Transcaucasian. This was the period of the New Economic Policy (NEP) and, in the Ukraine, the period of Ukrainization. A Language Act of August 1, 1923, proclaimed the priority of Ukrainian over Russian. For the first eight years of his life, then, my grandfather learned Russian. For the next five years, Russian changed to Ukrainian. Then, in 1928, Stalin abandoned the NEP, and though Russian was introduced as the “second” official language of the Republic, it was “second” on paper only. For the rest of his time in school my grandfather was forced to learn (if he didn’t always speak) Russian.

A mixed-up language background for a man whose mother tongue was already confused. But my grandfather thrived in the gap between the two languages. In exchange for food he would help other children with their problems. It wouldn’t be the last time that “translation” would keep his various families alive.

—

I grew up with a language I heard all the time but did not understand (and was not encouraged to learn). My relationship to it, then, was ambivalent, to say the least. I didn’t like my family doing something sinful (talking in a language I was told was wrong), yet I was attracted to the act because it was forbidden. (I can still remember fragments of conversation whose meaning I don’t know, as if, precisely because I did not understand, the words passed straight into me like voices into a tape.) This tension has conditioned my attitude to the language ever since. I both do and do not know. I can hear the sounds, I can feel the vowels and sibilants the way a man blind from birth can feel objects, but I don’t understand what they mean.

Sometimes I find myself believing that I’ve actually “forgotten” the language. And I convince myself of the validity of this belief by citing the example of my mother. My mother can speak Russian fluently but she has forgotten how to write it. It could be possible, therefore (this is what I tell myself), that like my mother, I knew the language as a child, but due to a formless repression, my capability atrophied like an unused limb.

Most of the time, however, the idea of a “forgotten language” is enough in itself and carries with it all the romance of a lost Atlantis. I believe, at times, that I have forgotten a language I never knew. It’s an important belief, psychologically speaking. Because I feel a terrible guilt that I never learned my mother’s tongue and yet I can’t blame her for not teaching me. Because my mother was herself forbidden to use her own language and forced to use another. And though my grandfather and grandmother did not comply entirely with the wishes of the State, my mother barely remembers her mother tongue (whatever that might be). At times you can see her, haunted by a word.

—

For some reason I always thought of my mother as less foreign than myself, as if foreignness was not an ethnic condition but a metaphysical state, a lack of alignment with reality. I grew up believing my mother’s accent was normal. Not because I assumed all Australians spoke English like Ukrainians; the truth was, my mother positioned herself in relation to the world (I had no idea then at what cost) the way everyone else I knew did. Her accent became invisible, like onion in a sauce, noticeable only in its absence. And I began to regard myself as strange. Perhaps this, then, was foreignness? The failure to understand your own voice; alienation from the tongue of your own thoughts. But if so, wasn’t everyone infected?

Their language was not Ukrainian, but equally it was not Russian. It was a mixture.

“We are not Russian, we are Ukrainian,” my grandmother says to me in Russian whenever, as a child, I ask her about her language.

My grandmother asks my mother a question in Ukrainian, my mother answers in English.

—

I remember school holidays, the confused looks on the faces of the shopkeepers as my grandmother moved between languages as if in herself they were all the same thing. But always the face, or a gesture, would bring her back. Still, it is on the phone that my grandmother is at her best. On the phone there are no such restrictions. She can speak as the language comes to her. A sentence might start in English, move to Ukrainian, jump the boundaries of German, and wind up somehow in Russia. She forgets I know nothing but English and I do nothing to disillusion her. Not out of indulgence, but because I understand her on the phone. You’d think it would be easier face to face, but gesture is what makes us foreign. Each language creates its own body. On the phone she makes me believe she is speaking my language, even though I know she is not. It’s possible, over the years, that I’ve learnt more of her language than I think I have. But in reality, what I’m talking about has little to do with comprehension. Somehow I just understand.

—

My grandfather started work as a translator in Melbourne the day after he disembarked. The title, however, was no more than an official stamp on what had become long ago the de facto basis of his life. He was already acting as a translator on the ship. And before that, it certainly wasn’t his charm that interested the Americans. They took him on in Bremen. He had sensed, long before, as a genius of survival senses such things, that the Americans were going to win the war. And he offered them, in addition to his tongue, a knowledge of German military machinery. The Americans, in turn, needed engineers of their own, and they taught him the workings of their own machines. He called this fortuitous, but by this time in his life there was nothing of fortune in anything he did. Everything was chance, even his fate, and so fortune lost its meaning. His arrival in Australia coincided with a Renaissance in the mining industry in the Hunter Valley. The new open cuts were all using American electrically driven heavy earth-moving and loading equipment. My grandfather’s knowledge was rare at the time, and for once (against the trend for other migrant professions), highly valued. He moved to Cessnock. And a few years later my mother met my father.

It’s funny, when I think about it, but my name John Hughes gives away none of this. It offers, in its concealment, not a translation, but the entelechy of his life’s desire to vanish without a trace.

XIII

He wanted to forget. What right do I have to stand in his way? Why won’t I let Australia become for him what it promised in the camps of post-war Europe: a land of forgetting? Why can’t I accept the Indian Ocean as another River Lethe? The Roman orator Marcus Tullius Cicero put the answer most succinctly: if you do not know what happened before you were born you will always remain a child. It’s a question of growing up.

And anyway, it was never that simple for him. Take April 25, for example. He understood the significance of that day of “remembrance” in a way I never could. Because he knew that Anzac Day, like all great national days, is not about remembering at all. While I marvelled at the old service men who had to be carried in order to “march”, he was watching a ceremony of forgetting. Because he’d already learnt (and could not forget) that we glorify the image of the past in order to forget its reality. That national ceremonies enable myths to become truths without pain. No one likes to admit he was mistaken. On these great days no one has to. And so we can do it all again. Because the body has no memory of physical pain. It’s how we survive suffering. Because memory is only ever experienced in the present. “Lest we forget,” the great crowd of the dead enjoins. The injunction should truly read: “Lest we remember”.

Can I blame him, then, for wanting to forget, even if forgetting was always going to be for him a losing battle? There are those, like Milan Kundera, who make of memory a moral responsibility. Who believe (and they have history on their side) that to destroy a people one need only erase its memory. “Destroy its books,” Kundera writes, quoting the historian Milan Hubl, “its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster”.⁵ Kundera speaks with the moral authority of the exile, yet there is another side. My argument is not that we try to forget the war, the Russian invasion of Eastern Europe, the Holocaust. What I’m saying is that we have already done so – the images of history win out over reality every time. You can choose, like Kundera, to side with memory, or you can choose, like my grandfather, and opt to forget; in either case you cannot help but bring the other in its train. Kundera believes that what terrifies us about death is not the loss of the future but the loss of the past. This is because he defines the self as “the sum of everything we remember”. But what if the self was equally, and at the same time, the sum of everything we forget? Would death be any less fearful?

XIV

Someday, someone should try to write an essay of forgetting. It would be so close to an essay of memory that those not skilled in the art of forgetting could probably not tell the difference. For only those skilled in forgetting know that memory is simply another form of the same; a more sophisticated form, perhaps, but no less effective for that.

—

The last time I saw him alive.

A Saturday, one week before I left for England. I was having lunch with him in a small restaurant in Newcastle. I can get most of what we ate, eventually. (I checked my memory against the bill which I found amongst his letters.) But what do I remember of the occasion? The words exchanged with him, the number of empty tables in the room, the number of our hesitations? The waitress: her hair, her habits of speech, the way she stood when she took our order? I remember her commenting jokingly on the speed with which I ate. And I remember my grandfather telling her the reason why. When I was a kid, if he finished his meal before me, he would reach across the table and steal the food from my plate with his fork. I don’t remember him doing this, but it is true that I eat fast. And he had no reason to lie. I remember the story made us laugh.

I’m forgetting him, even as I write. If he were still alive there is no guarantee this would be any different. He was already forgetting himself.

Why stand against the flow?

My hope is that some time in the future I might forget the second law of thermodynamics or the equations which reproduce nuclear fission; that I might forget war or my grandfather’s death; the beginnings of this country, a story of some quality, good and evil, the English language, and even, perhaps, the origin of the universe. It would be something to die knowing I had forgotten such things.

1. Joseph Brodsky, “Collector’s Item”, The Best American Essays 1993 (Ticknor & Fields, 1993), p.44
2. Joseph Brodsky, “Less Than One” in Less Than One: Selected Essays (Penguin, 1987), p.12.
3. Norman Davies, “The Misunderstood Victory in Europe”, The New York Review of Books, 25 May 1995, p.8.
4. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (Hill and Wang, 1981), pp.15, 80-81.
5. Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (Penguin, 1980), p.159.