You are on fire, Janine,’ my Dad used to say to me when I was a little girl.
I thought he was referring to the curly ginger hair which formed a halo around my head, but really he meant my personality. I could never sit still for more than ten minutes without getting distracted by something. Maybe it was impossible to settle anywhere as we moved from one place to another several times a year. We were all restless in many different ways. Dad would get a phone call and the next day we were packing our suitcases, saying goodbye to new friends and wondering how long we would stay in the next place.
The most notice we got was six days. We were in Prague at the time and I was in love with our neighbour’s son, Hynek, who was an expert at making sling shots and shooting down empty beer bottles. He once tried to teach me, but I didn’t understand anything he was saying as we had lived in Czechoslovakia for only two months. He tried again without talking, but I was far too clumsy to make a sling shot that wouldn’t fall apart. I liked the silence though and the concentration in his eyes. He was so focused he didn’t even realise that he stuck his tongue out and rolled it up on his upper lip. This was when I fell in love with him.
I didn’t want to leave, so I kept unpacking the suitcases my mother had packed. ‘What are you doing, Janine? You should be helping me. What’s wrong with you?’ She hated moving, but when the time came she would pack the suitcases in no time. She couldn’t understand why I didn’t show my usual enthusiasm, especially as our next stop was Spain, which I had longed to visit. Even the thought of Spanish beaches couldn’t beat Hynek’s eyes watching me as I was walking past him in the staircase. I pretended not to care about his gaze, so I would look away feigning indifference, but my heart was beating fast and my body felt hot. I was only twelve, but I knew that I was in love. Prague, Praha, means a threshold. There I stepped into my first experience of loving someone other than my father and it was a different kind of love. I had only a few days left to tell Hynek how I felt, but I didn’t even know how to say it in Czech. As I was folding the clothes and putting them back in the suitcase I imagined the ways in which I could confess my feelings. Leaving a note on the doormat was the safest option, but I would have to wait for his reply and didn’t have the patience for it. I decided to find a way to say it to him. I felt nervous thinking and rehearsing the words in my head. ‘I have always liked you, Hynek.’ No, no. ‘I like you a lot, Hynek.’ Or ‘I will never forget you.’ Or ‘I will never forget your eyes.’ Could a girl talk about a boy’s eyes? I wanted to ask my mother, but she would say that I was too young and didn’t know what love was about. I didn’t want my parents to know anyway. I couldn’t decide what to say to Hynek, but I needed to act quickly. I still had to learn how to say it in Czech. Our neighbour, Mrs Dvorska, spoke a little bit of English, so I wrote my sentence on a piece of paper and sneaked out of the flat. I knocked on Mrs Dvorska’s door and waited, careful not to be seen by anyone. The door creaked open and there stood my neighbour wearing a bathrobe and a head kerchief: ‘Yaninka! Please, please.’ She waved me into the kitchen and pointed to a chair. On the kitchen table lay Mrs Dvorska’s wig, gloves and reading glasses. I put the note on the table and pointed at it saying ‘Czech’. She glanced at the note and read it out pronouncing the words carefully as if she was weighing and measuring them. ‘Nikdy na tebe nezapomenu.’ She wrote the words down and made me repeat them over and over again until I pronounced them correctly. At home as I helped mother with packing the boxes of clothes and books, I whispered the sentence repeatedly. Nikdy na tebe nezapomenu. Mother did not notice it. She rarely noticed anything about me. I whispered the words slowly and carefully. Nikdy na tebe nezapomenu. Nikdy. For the first time I realised that people who stay in one place for a long time feel the weight of everything, like Mrs Dvorska pronouncing the words, or Hynek patiently working on his sling shot. Nikdy. Never. I never managed to see Hynek and say the practised words to him. Instead I put the note Mrs Dvorska wrote into his letterbox and hoped he realised who it was from. Mrs Dvorska’s shaky ornamental handwriting could have misled him.
The Czech language was a puzzle and Prague was a place of mystery and love. I walked the labyrinthine cobble-stoned streets stunned by the architecture, the red roofs, the windows divided into six, eight, or twelve rectangles, or the ornamented facades of tenements. It was a place from Dad’s fairy tales abundant in detail, which he would draw my attention to on our occasional walks. Some of the street lamps wore striking gilded crowns. Even the letters of the words on shop displays were crowned with unusual ticks, commas, and circles. What did they mean? Mother didn’t know the answer and she was too preoccupied with the shopping to notice. ‘Don’t bother yourself with it, Janine. It’s not worth trying to understand it. We won’t stay here forever.’ To her people in the streets spoke one language, everything was noise, but I heard many different languages mixed together into a beautiful song I couldn’t understand. For a long time, the city itself had been home to three groups, Czechs, Germans, and Jews. Perhaps this was why hotels and restaurants had the word tří in their names. U Tří králů. U Tří čápů. U Tří růží. Number three meant a cohesive whole, unlike my family triad which was fragile and unstable. We also came from different places and tried to live together: mother from England, father from Ukraine, and me – hovering and floating between the two of them, speaking my mother’s mother tongue, but not knowing the place it came from. I never knew if I was from the East or the West of Europe, the North or the South. I was a blur. The needle of my compass was going in circles. I felt Prague was a good place for us as it welcomed everyone, it swallowed everyone into its enticing labyrinth. Dad and I got lost many times trying to find our way to Karlův Most crossing the Vltava river. I liked looking at the monuments lining the bridge, mostly of men holding objects, a book or a sceptre. Women held babies or looked wistfully at men. I could never identify with these women. At the castle I saw a painting of a woman with a book, but found out that she was beheaded for being too well educated and therefore intimidating to men. Her name was Catherine.
I was crying on the way to Spain and lied to my parents that it was a stomach ache. Mother believed me and ignored my tears, but Dad caught my eye in the rear-view mirror. ‘Did you like Prague, Jani?’ I watched the landscape rolling by. ‘Not really.’ Mother clasped her hands. ‘I never liked it either. In fact, I hated it. I hated…’ Dad and I listened to mother’s complaints about the Czech food, people, culture, incomprehensible language. She couldn’t wait to unpack the boxes and arrange everything the same way she had always done. She had rehearsed it so many times. Looking at the photos of our flats in Moscow, Kiev, Prague, they were all almost identical. It was in Madrid that I started disrupting the seeming permanence of home which mother had desperately tried to imitate. There was a pleasure in watching her panic when she saw things out of their place. Every day I moved one or two things – her hairbrush, her slippers, the phone book. It was enough to unnerve her. I didn’t know at the time why I had developed such a dislike for our constantly recreated home. It must have seemed fake to me.
I made friends quickly in Madrid, but did not say goodbye when we left. After Prague I wanted us to move from one place to another as quickly as possible. I didn’t understand what people meant when they said they were friends for life with someone. It was an absurd concept invented by people who were afraid of embracing the lightness of life. I was always baffled by the people who would cling to this idea. My mother was like that most of the time probably because of my grandparents. She never wanted to talk about them, so I didn’t know much except that they came from a rural town somewhere in England. Dad asked me not to press mother, she would tell me all at some point. I didn’t mention my grandparents again until much later. Her silences intrigued me, but I was used to her evasiveness about the past. I was used to being shut out. Sometimes I wished I had a present mother and a country of my own. It was strange for me to think that I was once inside her, an inseparable part of her. Since I was born she seemed to have filled herself with secrets and memories Dad and I had no access to. I am being unfair. She would let me in sometimes, like that day when she told me about the orchard she would play in as a child.
‘There were many apple and plum trees behind the house. Long rows of beautiful trees tended to by my father, his father’s father, and so on. It was like a paradise in the summer, at least that’s what I believed. I spent hours lying on the ground listening to the sound of falling fruit. I would take one off the ground and smell its skin. I will never forget that smell. It was like nothing else in the world.’
I knew that she felt vulnerable by opening herself to me and letting out scant images of her past, even though I couldn’t place these images on any map or draw the world mother had inhabited. Apple and plum trees could be anywhere. It was as if the worlds we lived in existed on different planes, mutually distant dimensions. I had always felt that it was more important what she wasn’t saying, which took me into and round my web of imagination. I had almost learnt to live with that. When I was little she would warn me not to be too open with people, to keep myself to myself as she believed others might use anything against our family. Despite her warnings I had never developed distrust towards people. I almost wanted to prove mother wrong by being open and honest with everyone. I did get hurt eventually, but I never shared it with her. I could imagine her turning towards me, her blonde curly hair resting on her shoulders, her eyes fixed on me.
‘Janine, I have warned you. You should have listened to me. Sometimes it takes a lifetime to trust someone. You can’t give yourself away like this. People will take advantage of you. Protect yourself from such people.’
‘Such people’ have always been part of my life as they have become part of my opposition to mother. I hardly understood what she meant. I knew she trusted Dad and he loved her more than he had loved himself and I wanted to know where this love came from. Not that I didn’t feel it for her. I did, but I resented the lack of closeness and my starved curiosity about her past.
Dad, on the other hand, would take me on long journeys back into his childhood, mixing reality with fantasy by spicing his stories with flying horses and imperishable old men. I asked him once why he had decided to become a journalist rather than a writer. He answered that life was ruled by the principle of the random rather than the logical. He told me tales about Ukraine, where he was born and spent the first eight years of his life. The images of the landscape and small towns were forever imprinted on his memory: brick houses, willows, a blind fiddler walking down a dirt road playing a folk song about a broken-hearted girl standing barefoot in the snow. There was something both romanticised and painful in his narrative of the past, but he never tried to escape from it like mother had done. His careful eye recorded all the minute details as it scanned the horizons of Ukraine, Georgia, Russia, England, Russia again, Czechoslovakia, Spain. The one I loved listening to over and over again was about his summer holiday in the Caucasus Mountains in his great-uncle’s village, Lakhushdi. Dad said it was an ancient region, Svaneti, inhabited by the Svans, famous for their old polyphonic songs. He kept the tape with his Dad’s recordings of the local singers which he played to me, but as a child I didn’t appreciate the strange harmonies. ‘Listen, Janine. You might not recognise the music, you might want to resist it, but listen. There will come a time when these sounds will open up new spaces for you and the world will be vast.’ That feeling never came, but I could see the vastness in Dad’s eyes when he described the mountains and the sky over the village. With time the same stories grew bigger and bigger each time he retold them to me, as if he wanted to expand his memories, to remember in more detail and with greater intensity. Perhaps he wanted to make up for my mother’s increasing silence. Despite his promises he never managed to show me Ukraine or Georgia, ‘I want you to see the rivers, the forests, and the towers of Svaneti and try the fresh milk. It is like nothing you have tasted before. We will have a bonfire in the evening in the field surrounded by high snow-capped mountains. We will sing and dance and play games with villagers.’ Very few people saw this side of him. I heard him talking to his journalist friends in a matter-of-fact way. They would make dark jokes about the grimmest topics they had to cover, as if empathy had evaporated from them.
The most notice we got was six days. We were in Prague at the time and I was in love with our neighbour’s son, Hynek, who was an expert at making sling shots and shooting down empty beer bottles. He once tried to teach me, but I didn’t understand anything he was saying as we had lived in Czechoslovakia for only two months. He tried again without talking, but I was far too clumsy to make a sling shot that wouldn’t fall apart. I liked the silence though and the concentration in his eyes. He was so focused he didn’t even realise that he stuck his tongue out and rolled it up on his upper lip. This was when I fell in love with him.
I didn’t want to leave, so I kept unpacking the suitcases my mother had packed. ‘What are you doing, Janine? You should be helping me. What’s wrong with you?’ She hated moving, but when the time came she would pack the suitcases in no time. She couldn’t understand why I didn’t show my usual enthusiasm, especially as our next stop was Spain, which I had longed to visit. Even the thought of Spanish beaches couldn’t beat Hynek’s eyes watching me as I was walking past him in the staircase. I pretended not to care about his gaze, so I would look away feigning indifference, but my heart was beating fast and my body felt hot. I was only twelve, but I knew that I was in love. Prague, Praha, means a threshold. There I stepped into my first experience of loving someone other than my father and it was a different kind of love. I had only a few days left to tell Hynek how I felt, but I didn’t even know how to say it in Czech. As I was folding the clothes and putting them back in the suitcase I imagined the ways in which I could confess my feelings. Leaving a note on the doormat was the safest option, but I would have to wait for his reply and didn’t have the patience for it. I decided to find a way to say it to him. I felt nervous thinking and rehearsing the words in my head. ‘I have always liked you, Hynek.’ No, no. ‘I like you a lot, Hynek.’ Or ‘I will never forget you.’ Or ‘I will never forget your eyes.’ Could a girl talk about a boy’s eyes? I wanted to ask my mother, but she would say that I was too young and didn’t know what love was about. I didn’t want my parents to know anyway. I couldn’t decide what to say to Hynek, but I needed to act quickly. I still had to learn how to say it in Czech. Our neighbour, Mrs Dvorska, spoke a little bit of English, so I wrote my sentence on a piece of paper and sneaked out of the flat. I knocked on Mrs Dvorska’s door and waited, careful not to be seen by anyone. The door creaked open and there stood my neighbour wearing a bathrobe and a head kerchief: ‘Yaninka! Please, please.’ She waved me into the kitchen and pointed to a chair. On the kitchen table lay Mrs Dvorska’s wig, gloves and reading glasses. I put the note on the table and pointed at it saying ‘Czech’. She glanced at the note and read it out pronouncing the words carefully as if she was weighing and measuring them. ‘Nikdy na tebe nezapomenu.’ She wrote the words down and made me repeat them over and over again until I pronounced them correctly. At home as I helped mother with packing the boxes of clothes and books, I whispered the sentence repeatedly. Nikdy na tebe nezapomenu. Mother did not notice it. She rarely noticed anything about me. I whispered the words slowly and carefully. Nikdy na tebe nezapomenu. Nikdy. For the first time I realised that people who stay in one place for a long time feel the weight of everything, like Mrs Dvorska pronouncing the words, or Hynek patiently working on his sling shot. Nikdy. Never. I never managed to see Hynek and say the practised words to him. Instead I put the note Mrs Dvorska wrote into his letterbox and hoped he realised who it was from. Mrs Dvorska’s shaky ornamental handwriting could have misled him.
The Czech language was a puzzle and Prague was a place of mystery and love. I walked the labyrinthine cobble-stoned streets stunned by the architecture, the red roofs, the windows divided into six, eight, or twelve rectangles, or the ornamented facades of tenements. It was a place from Dad’s fairy tales abundant in detail, which he would draw my attention to on our occasional walks. Some of the street lamps wore striking gilded crowns. Even the letters of the words on shop displays were crowned with unusual ticks, commas, and circles. What did they mean? Mother didn’t know the answer and she was too preoccupied with the shopping to notice. ‘Don’t bother yourself with it, Janine. It’s not worth trying to understand it. We won’t stay here forever.’ To her people in the streets spoke one language, everything was noise, but I heard many different languages mixed together into a beautiful song I couldn’t understand. For a long time, the city itself had been home to three groups, Czechs, Germans, and Jews. Perhaps this was why hotels and restaurants had the word tří in their names. U Tří králů. U Tří čápů. U Tří růží. Number three meant a cohesive whole, unlike my family triad which was fragile and unstable. We also came from different places and tried to live together: mother from England, father from Ukraine, and me – hovering and floating between the two of them, speaking my mother’s mother tongue, but not knowing the place it came from. I never knew if I was from the East or the West of Europe, the North or the South. I was a blur. The needle of my compass was going in circles. I felt Prague was a good place for us as it welcomed everyone, it swallowed everyone into its enticing labyrinth. Dad and I got lost many times trying to find our way to Karlův Most crossing the Vltava river. I liked looking at the monuments lining the bridge, mostly of men holding objects, a book or a sceptre. Women held babies or looked wistfully at men. I could never identify with these women. At the castle I saw a painting of a woman with a book, but found out that she was beheaded for being too well educated and therefore intimidating to men. Her name was Catherine.
I was crying on the way to Spain and lied to my parents that it was a stomach ache. Mother believed me and ignored my tears, but Dad caught my eye in the rear-view mirror. ‘Did you like Prague, Jani?’ I watched the landscape rolling by. ‘Not really.’ Mother clasped her hands. ‘I never liked it either. In fact, I hated it. I hated…’ Dad and I listened to mother’s complaints about the Czech food, people, culture, incomprehensible language. She couldn’t wait to unpack the boxes and arrange everything the same way she had always done. She had rehearsed it so many times. Looking at the photos of our flats in Moscow, Kiev, Prague, they were all almost identical. It was in Madrid that I started disrupting the seeming permanence of home which mother had desperately tried to imitate. There was a pleasure in watching her panic when she saw things out of their place. Every day I moved one or two things – her hairbrush, her slippers, the phone book. It was enough to unnerve her. I didn’t know at the time why I had developed such a dislike for our constantly recreated home. It must have seemed fake to me.
I made friends quickly in Madrid, but did not say goodbye when we left. After Prague I wanted us to move from one place to another as quickly as possible. I didn’t understand what people meant when they said they were friends for life with someone. It was an absurd concept invented by people who were afraid of embracing the lightness of life. I was always baffled by the people who would cling to this idea. My mother was like that most of the time probably because of my grandparents. She never wanted to talk about them, so I didn’t know much except that they came from a rural town somewhere in England. Dad asked me not to press mother, she would tell me all at some point. I didn’t mention my grandparents again until much later. Her silences intrigued me, but I was used to her evasiveness about the past. I was used to being shut out. Sometimes I wished I had a present mother and a country of my own. It was strange for me to think that I was once inside her, an inseparable part of her. Since I was born she seemed to have filled herself with secrets and memories Dad and I had no access to. I am being unfair. She would let me in sometimes, like that day when she told me about the orchard she would play in as a child.
‘There were many apple and plum trees behind the house. Long rows of beautiful trees tended to by my father, his father’s father, and so on. It was like a paradise in the summer, at least that’s what I believed. I spent hours lying on the ground listening to the sound of falling fruit. I would take one off the ground and smell its skin. I will never forget that smell. It was like nothing else in the world.’
I knew that she felt vulnerable by opening herself to me and letting out scant images of her past, even though I couldn’t place these images on any map or draw the world mother had inhabited. Apple and plum trees could be anywhere. It was as if the worlds we lived in existed on different planes, mutually distant dimensions. I had always felt that it was more important what she wasn’t saying, which took me into and round my web of imagination. I had almost learnt to live with that. When I was little she would warn me not to be too open with people, to keep myself to myself as she believed others might use anything against our family. Despite her warnings I had never developed distrust towards people. I almost wanted to prove mother wrong by being open and honest with everyone. I did get hurt eventually, but I never shared it with her. I could imagine her turning towards me, her blonde curly hair resting on her shoulders, her eyes fixed on me.
‘Janine, I have warned you. You should have listened to me. Sometimes it takes a lifetime to trust someone. You can’t give yourself away like this. People will take advantage of you. Protect yourself from such people.’
‘Such people’ have always been part of my life as they have become part of my opposition to mother. I hardly understood what she meant. I knew she trusted Dad and he loved her more than he had loved himself and I wanted to know where this love came from. Not that I didn’t feel it for her. I did, but I resented the lack of closeness and my starved curiosity about her past.
Dad, on the other hand, would take me on long journeys back into his childhood, mixing reality with fantasy by spicing his stories with flying horses and imperishable old men. I asked him once why he had decided to become a journalist rather than a writer. He answered that life was ruled by the principle of the random rather than the logical. He told me tales about Ukraine, where he was born and spent the first eight years of his life. The images of the landscape and small towns were forever imprinted on his memory: brick houses, willows, a blind fiddler walking down a dirt road playing a folk song about a broken-hearted girl standing barefoot in the snow. There was something both romanticised and painful in his narrative of the past, but he never tried to escape from it like mother had done. His careful eye recorded all the minute details as it scanned the horizons of Ukraine, Georgia, Russia, England, Russia again, Czechoslovakia, Spain. The one I loved listening to over and over again was about his summer holiday in the Caucasus Mountains in his great-uncle’s village, Lakhushdi. Dad said it was an ancient region, Svaneti, inhabited by the Svans, famous for their old polyphonic songs. He kept the tape with his Dad’s recordings of the local singers which he played to me, but as a child I didn’t appreciate the strange harmonies. ‘Listen, Janine. You might not recognise the music, you might want to resist it, but listen. There will come a time when these sounds will open up new spaces for you and the world will be vast.’ That feeling never came, but I could see the vastness in Dad’s eyes when he described the mountains and the sky over the village. With time the same stories grew bigger and bigger each time he retold them to me, as if he wanted to expand his memories, to remember in more detail and with greater intensity. Perhaps he wanted to make up for my mother’s increasing silence. Despite his promises he never managed to show me Ukraine or Georgia, ‘I want you to see the rivers, the forests, and the towers of Svaneti and try the fresh milk. It is like nothing you have tasted before. We will have a bonfire in the evening in the field surrounded by high snow-capped mountains. We will sing and dance and play games with villagers.’ Very few people saw this side of him. I heard him talking to his journalist friends in a matter-of-fact way. They would make dark jokes about the grimmest topics they had to cover, as if empathy had evaporated from them.
Agata Maslowska is a poet, writer, and translator born in Poland and living in Scotland. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in various magazines and anthologies. She received the Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award. https://agatamaslowska.co.uk Twitter: @AgataMaslowska
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