My childhood garden blossomed under the influence and protection of two great stars: the sun, who was my father, and the moon, who was my mother. They were together only on Sundays or holidays; otherwise, when one was there, the other was not. The fact that they had to take turns to look after me was connected to their working hours. My mother was a doctor, an internist, and she left home at seven in the morning to go to the hospital. With rapid steps she paced through three kilometres of narrow streets in the outskirts of Moscow, covering the distance more quickly that way – by tram, it would have taken her half an hour longer. She never stopped being a good walker, even when she grew old.
My father was a war invalid, without a work permission, which meant that the doctors considered him a hopeless case. He received a small state pension and to help the family he worked at home as an artisan. He was the one who woke me in the morning.
My memories go back to when I was two and a half, when in the warmth of the morning sun my father’s smiling face appeared, with his almost bald head (he had started to lose his hair when he was still a young man).
I was glad to wake up. The wood-burning heater was already turned on, in the small bedroom you could smell the smoke and hear the crackling of burning wood. Through the half-iced-over window filtered the slanted morning sun. During the day the ice usually melted, but at night it formed again.
My father’s face bending over me filled me with happiness. I would grab his few hairs and pull them. That was my way of showing my love for him. I felt a boundless joy inside me as I looked forward to a wonderful day, full of light, of snow, and of our exciting sled rides.
My father dressed me and made breakfast for both of us. He cleared away the plate with two eggshells and the empty cup my mother had left in her hurry. To help me reach the height of the table, he sat me on two cushions on a chair and tied me to the chair back with his wide military belt. One time I felt that belt on my skin, when at the age of thirteen I rebelled against my mother.
Papa brought two dishes of cascia (oatmeal) from the kitchen, just off the cooker and still steaming, and some hot tea. We ate breakfast sitting opposite one another. He was incredibly fast. In two minutes he’d finished eating, and while I was still trying to get my mother’s homemade jam out of the jar with a spoon, he went into the room where the knitting-machine was kept. He arranged the threads and began to knit. It was a hand-run machine.
Papa’s arms made the metal carriage go, moving from right to left, left right, right left.
I would finish up the jam and go and watch papa at work. You could smell the machine oil. I would squat down near him on a rug. There were small drops of sweat on his forehead; his round head shone like our heater, which was covered with bright tiles. After a shot time he would take off his shirt because he was too hot. His arms were large and muscular, with swollen veins. On his right side, from the neck to the shoulder, there was a prominent brown scar.
I knew that when he was at the front a hand-grenade fragment had gone into his neck and lodged itself in a lung. Grandma said it was a miracle he was still alive. When I asked her how big the fragment was, she showed me her thumbnail.
One day, the neighbour’s cat’s new kitten scratched me while I was trying to get it to taste my jam. It hurt, and the scratch drew blood. When I thought of the kitten’s tiny claw and my father’s fragment, I imagined a lion sticking its claws into his neck.
When I was three years old I began going to nursery school. I can still remember the noise of the tram screeching on the icy rails in the middle of winter. After climbing with difficulty up the three steps, helped by my father’s push from behind, I found myself inside the carriage, closed in by icy windows, full of people breathing. There was the smell of metal and wool garments and I thought the people were breathing to heat the tram.
Papa asked me, “Are your hands cold?”. Even when they weren’t, I answered yes. He took off my gloves and warmed my hands with his breath; he said something funny and laughed. It seemed he could even warm the air that surrounded him.
In those days in Russia all children wore their gloves attached to a piece of elastic. Probably some desperate mother had invented this solution when one of her numerous brood had lost their hundredth pair of gloves. You took a normal elastic band about one metre long and you sewed one end to the hem of the right-hand glove and the other to the left-hand glove. The elastic band was hung around the child’s neck like a scarf, with the hands thrust into the gloves. Then the coat was put on over his gloved hands. If the child got warm and took off his gloves distractedly while he was playing, they would remain attached to the elastic band and wouldn’t get lost. My early childhood ended when my mother stopped putting on the elastic band, and I felt that now it was my responsibility not to lose my gloves.
When we reached the nursery school stop, we got off the tram. I would run in front of papa, and he pretended to run after me. I didn’t feel the cold: it was like wallowing in the winter air, cool and dense like the water in the river in my aunt’s village. I laughed happily and I felt grown up, lovely and very attractive. I have read that the first man who makes you feel like a woman is your father, and it’s true. At the age of three I was happy, loved and contented. If my femininity has been secure and satisfying since then, I owe this to my father, too, to his tenderness and patience.
Our great friendship lasted almost thirty years, until his death. Once, when he was already afflicted with from heart disease, we were walking down the street and we saw an old man with a stick; his back was so bent that he was forced to look down at the ground all the time. A dark cloud crossed my father’s face: “I never want to be like that”, he said, his eyes looking towards the old man who was creeping along in front of us.
He didn’t want to live looking down at the ground all the time: he was meant to be surrounded by blue skies, like a small star, like the birds he loved so well and would watch, full of admiration, as they flew freely, ever higher and higher. He was a simple person, an artist of life: he was able to harmonize the contrasting forces between me and my mother, between my mother and her relatives. He was the life of the best days I ever passed with my cousins: games, songs, laughter, merriness.
He loved open spaces, far-off horizons with their promise of infinity.
And the heaven he loved so well heard him. He died upright and handsome, like a tree cut down suddenly: a small sun full of heat and light had gone out. He didn’t want to grow old, and he did not.
In those years, when I was still very small, we lived in a wood house in the outskirts of Moscow. Two small rooms that my maternal grandmother had bought after her large house had been expropriated. Her husband was parish priest in a small town near Moscow. During Stalin’s regime he was exiled to Siberia, and their eight children had to be sent away to various parts of the country.
My mother, who was the youngest, stayed with my grandmother. She worked as a nurse in a hospital in Moscow while studying at night to become a doctor. My grandmother died just before the war, and my mother volunteered for the front. There she met my father and married him.
She was tall and slender with a long, pale face. When I was born she was very thin. She had a good appetite, but she restrained herself at table to leave more for me and papa. From the age of fifteen she’d had to hide the truth about her father’s exile, and this trauma influenced her behaviour for the rest of her life. She was very reserved, surrounded by an aura of mystery. My aim as a child was to discover everything that tormented my mother, and that was linked to with her family’s troubled past. Her character was like the moon, with the highs and lows of the tides; I felt her force rise and fall around me and papa.
At first sight she seemed cold, contrary to the warmth of my father. She possessed the gift of understanding others, and this ability was what allowed her to survive during the years of the Regime, when millions of strong young men and women were sent to distant forced labour camps for a silly mistake, an unsuitable remark or a political joke. For nothing.
She had suffered greatly, and towards the end of her life her character underwent a remarkable change: the highs and lows disappeared, and she grew even-tempered, conserving the tactfulness she’d always had.
As a child I was irrationally tied to my mother, as though the navel cord between us had never been cut. Fortunately, over the years this attachment grew into a great love. Our meetings and partings began when I was three years old.
Every summer, we children from my nursery school were sent off to stay in wood cabins in the countryside, near forests, lakes or rivers. They were marvellous places. My mother came to visit every Saturday and stayed with me all day Sunday.
On the night between Saturday and Sunday I slept with her in the big bed in the izba she rented for the weekend, near the summer village of the nursery school. She listened well into the night while I told her what I’d done during the week, and she told me stories she made up on the spot. During the day we would go for a walk, and in the heat of the afternoon we would hide in the shade of the nearby wood. She taught me the secret rhythms of nature, which she understood thanks to her introspective character.
We would gather wild flowers, and she made garlands to put on our heads. This is an age-old Russian custom, left over from a timeless past. Mine was always falling down, and I let it hang around my neck, like a small savage.
We would play my favourite game, pretending to be fairies and queens. I remember the t-shirt and shorts I wore in the summer. My mother wore a sarafan, a light sleeveless dress, with tiny blue flowers on a white ground, and a light scarf around her shoulders.
On a clearing under centuries-old trees, which we had made our stage, we invented our fairy tales.
“I’ll be the queen and you be the fairy”, I said as I adjusted my garland. “Give me your scarf”. The scarf could become a queen’s marvellous skirt, tied around the waist with a narrow ribbon.
One day a passer-by applauded from behind the trees.
“My compliments, madam, to you and your daughter. You are very beautiful, together.”
My mother answered with a laugh like small bells tinkling in the light breeze: with the garland of flowers on her head, she really did look like a fairy. Those were unforgettable days, when there were only the two of us, my mother and I. Even papa was excluded from this union, when I had my mother all to myself.
On Sunday evening she had to walk three kilometres to the station to get back to the city. We agreed on how far I could walk with her; when we arrived there, I would ask her to walk me back. And this would happen three, four, five times, until my aunt, who was head of the nursery school, took me by the hand and made me let go of my mother, who would leave without saying a word, her eyes full of tears.
My mother’s extreme sensitivity did not diminish over time, and even many years later, when I was already married with a daughter, our story of meetings and partings continued. Each time I visited Moscow, each time she came to Italy, was marked by the great happiness of our meetings and the pain of separation.
The house of my childhood, with the heater burning and the half-iced-over windows, has remained in my memory as a place of peace and serenity. And when I risk giving in to life’s troubles, I go back in my mind to that place, I squat on the rug near my father and listen to the creaking of the old knitting-machine, I sniff the burning wood and I am at peace again.
When I look up at the sky and see the sun setting on my right and the moon transparent but clear on my left, it seems that I can make out in the distance my father’s smiling face and the garland of flowers on my mother’s head. Now they are together, both of them united, something that almost never happened when I was a little girl. A war invalid and the daughter of a parish priest in exile are there, in the heaven of my childhood, and will never set.
Natalia Soloviova was born in Moscow in 1946. She has lived in Cardano al Campo (Varese) since 1973. She has a degree in mechanical engineering and is a technical translator. She has participated in the Eks&Tra competition and was among the winners of the 1998 edition.