On a shelf in a cellar in the former KGB headquarters in Chernigov, in the
black earth country in the heart of the Ukraine, lies a thick file with a
crumbling brown cardboard cover. It contains about three pounds of paper,
the sheets carefully numbered and bound. Its subject is my mother's father,
Boris Lvovich Bibikov, whose name is entered on the cover in curiously
elaborate, copperplate script. The file records my grandfather's progress
from life to death at the hands of Stalin's secret police as the summer of
1937 turned to autumn and the great Purge of the Communist Party swept away
a generation of old Bolsheviks.
I saw the file in a dingy office in the old secret police headquarters in
Kiev fifty-eight years after his death. It sat heavily in my lap, eerily
malignant, a swollen tumor of paper. Typed on flimsy forms or handwritten on
scrap paper in archaic script, the file existed on that peculiarly Russian
border between banal bureaucracy and painful poignancy. It was a compilation
of the absurdly petty - a receipt for the confiscation of a Browning
automatic and 23 rounds of ammunition, another for the confiscation of his
daughter's Young Pioneer holiday trip voucher - and the starkly shocking.
Long confessions, written in microscopic, crabbed writing, covered in
blotches and apparently written under torture, my grandfather's confessions
to being an 'enemy of the people'. The final document is a clumsily
mimeographed slip, confirming that the sentence of death passed by a closed
court in Kiev had been carried out on October 14th, 1937. The signature of
his executioner is a casual squiggle. Since the careful bureaucrats who
compiled the file neglected to say where he was buried, this stack of paper
is the closest thing to Boris Bibikov's earthly remains.
In the attic of No. 7, Alderney Street, Pimlico, London, is a handsome
steamer trunk, marked 'W.H.M Matthews, St. Antony's College, Oxford, ANGLIA'
in neat black painted letters. It contains a love story. Or perhaps it
contains a love. In the trunk are hundreds of my parents' love-letters,
carefully arranged by date in stacks, starting in July 1964, ending in
October 1969. Many are on thin airmail paper, others on multiple sheets of
neat white writing paper. For the six years that my British father and
Russian mother were separated by the fortunes of the Cold War, they wrote to
each other every day, sometimes twice a day. They talk of tiny incidents
from the few months they spent together in Moscow, they gossip about mutual
friends and meals and films. At moments their epistolary conversation is so
intimate that reading the letters feels like a violation. At others the pain
of separation is so intense that the paper seems to tremble with it. But
above all the letters are charged with loss, and loneliness, and with a love
so great, as my mother wrote, "that it can move mountains and turn the world
on its axis." And though the letters are full of pain, I think that they
also describe the happiest period of their lives.
As I leaf through the letters now, sitting on the floor of the London
attic which was my childhood room, where I slept for eighteen years not a
yard from where the letters lay in their locked trunk in the box-room under
the eaves of the house, and where I listened to the sound of my parents
raised voices drifting up the stairs, it occurs to me that here is where my
parents' love is. "Every letter is a piece of our soul, they mustn't get
lost," my mother wrote during their first agonizing months. "Your letters
bring me little pieces of you, of your life, your breath, your beating
heart." And so they spilled their souls out onto paper reams of paper,
impregnated with pain, desire and love, chains of paper, relays of it,
rumbling through the night on mail trains across Europe almost without
interruption for six years. "As our letters travel they take on a magical
quality - in that lies their strength," she wrote. "Every line is the blood
of my heart, and there is no limit to how much I can pour out." But by the
time my parents were re-united, they found there was barely enough love left
over. It had all been turned into ink, and written over a thousand sheets of
paper, carefully folded in a trunk in the attic of a terraced house in
London.
Fearless, gripping, at once darkly funny and tender, spanning three continents and numerous lives, Americanah is a richly told story set in today's globalized world.
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