This week I suffered a great irony. I have been doing a lot of research into the Stalinist era and its terror for a book project. I am reading biographies of soviet poets who killed themselves before they could be killed, and Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate- he is extra special to me as I discovered him the most vainglorious way: Alphabetically we sit beside each other in bookshops. I read Everything Flows then rather naively and optimistically gave Life and Fate to a beau a few Christmases ago believing him and I could read it together, as if our relationship could last such a long and arduous book: it didn’t and my copy remained tainted, untouched on my nightstand for months, while his, I assume, lingers in some Edinburgh charity shop, still unopened. Falling in love is as quick as reading a poem. Falling out of love takes a Tolstoyan effort. I am also rereading Lydia Ginzburg’s Notes from the Blockade, on the siege of Leningrad which I reread every few years because no better book exists on the effect of starvation and war on humans, how it reduces us to petty longings for bread made with sawdust, that it has the power to erase gender, culture, morals, celebrations, family, dreams and fantasies. Sufferers of the famine could no longer daydream of the delicious food they ate in a previous life, Lydia Ginzburg explains, instead craving more of the horrible food they were forced to eat as there was nothing else: more sawdust bread, more beetroot tops, more paint thinner. My grandfather was in the Siberian camps during the 30s. It’s surreal to think of that body I miss embracing, clothed in tan velour and smelling of cologne and cabbage, desperately looking for bones in the frozen earth, or more of the gruesome camp porridge, but less far off than I think. (Our surname, by the way, refers to chunks of frozen earth) I have had weeks this year, ( called a banner year for me in the guardian) where I have eaten one potato per day, where the expectation of slow coming payments for work has led to insomnia and self harm, and weeks in the previous years where unsold and expired sandwiches at work were taken home and reconstructed: the coleslaw scraped off and used on something else because the taste of the sandwiches on the whole had by this point made you feel sick from relying on them, the sickly guilt of throwing away free food when groceries mean the council tax and phone bills will be late. These mixed with going to literary prize parties where I over drink the free fizz and make myself sick on the free arancini, as if I can store it all in my thighs to savour later, mixed with the days when the long over due paycheque comes and I manically gorge on steak, Pernod and delusions of grandeur in restaurants instead of rationally buying a kilo or two of rice.
You can see destitution in British grocery shops, as people facing inflation and hunger look carefully over prices and increasingly rely on food banks, though the shelves are rottenly full of food, blatantly grotesque inventions like salmon mousse coloured to look like gold and crisps flavoured like turkeys. You can see the destitution in multiple wars going on in the world where the horrors of Notes from the Blockade are repeating themselves, like the world is a carousel of terror and suffering.
Today I met a friend who treated me to a coffee and discussed the siege of Leningrad, and he told me an anecdote about one of my favourite composers, Shostakovich, whose Symphony no 7, was due to be performed the summer after the winter famine, when culture was slowly awakening again. They couldn’t find the drummer needed. He was in the morgue, apparently dead of starvation but they discovered, still alive, and they revived him in time to play. At ballets, dancers collapsed, no longer able to carry each other’s weight, as I read on the Mariinsky theatre website, which I was surprised to still have access to during this second Cold War.
So the irony. Yesterday, I was opening my living room window to let my cat, Ludwig, in from outside and the curtain bar above broke and fell onto the bridge of my nose. It’s black and made of iron. My nose wasn’t visibly disfigured or bruised, but suffered inner trauma. It hurts when I chew and I have to eat mushy things very slowly. I am usually a panic sort of eater, who consumes quickly as if it will be taken away, then feels sick after. My cat is the same way, he can open kitchen cupboards and help himself to food like a Beatrix Potter character, swallowing gulps of treats and kibble hurriedly, which leads to vocal arguments between us. Perhaps the feeling is leftover from having many kitten siblings as I have always made sure he has plenty to eat even when I don’t and that duty of care keeps me going in my darkest moments. You can’t drown yourself, who is going to feed the cat? This morning, the bleakness of such thoughts was lifted by him. He came in with a blob of something dark and thick on his forehead which I first to my horror thought was blood, but he was perfectly fine and it was bicycle grease from an odd habit of his: of smelling and sitting under the bicycles on our communal stair, perhaps his curiosity piqued of the scents from around the city and beyond his territory of the drying green, the bicycle wheel like a zoetrope of new sensations.
A relative I had lost touch with passed away recently, and I am going to help clean out his apartment, which is full of books on Stalin and the Soviet Union, an interest in a historical period I didn’t know he shared with me, though it has effected our lives deeply, obviously and obscurely at the same time. I have a photo somewhere of him holding me as a baby in Canada before he was deported and sent back under the iron curtain, which as a child, I always visualised as a large and suffocating brown fur coat. I didn’t see him again until the mid 2000s, in pre-brexit Britain where I was studying on scholarship and eastern europeans were welcome. He took me to a rural English Asda and bought me a cornucopia of food, as if making up for all those years unseen. This week I remembered an Italian song he played for me when I was in my early twenties. In the first line, a woman refers to a man she knows as animal like, with no history or memory.
I’m reading Sofia Petronova, one of the gorgeous Persephone reissues, set and written during the Stalinist purges. A beautiful translation and a really moving story.