Bukvar

For all that it had clearly been made on the cheap, the book had an undeniable elegance to it. I was taken in at first, quiet, curious child that I was, by its handsome teal boards and the carmine of its cloth binding, by the strange lettering on the cover, set between two solemn faces, one a little gentler, with deep-set melancholy eyes and a drooping walrus moustache, the other of apparently nobler mien, a high-collared shirt poking out from under the cross-hatching of his lapels. It was a gift from my grandfather, and ah, the happy months I spent poring over its mysterious contents, attempting to decipher the hieroglyphs of his past — the start of a lifelong endeavour.

A children’s ABC, it revealed, page by page, the proverbial az to izhitsa of Cyrillic, each letter accompanied by a simple ink drawing and text, first in practical unserifed type, then below in cursive’s poised fancy. It began with the vowels, and a scene of pastoral exhilaration. A trio of boys watched on as a giant hare tore across an open field, their slack-jawed wonder unseen by the reader but implied well enough by three gaping Os at the foot of the page. More letters in turn were suggested by the whinnying of two foals, by the bleating of a billy-goat as it escaped its young handler, and by a drawn-out groan of dismay as a schoolboy in breeches forever dropped his copybook and inkpot on the floor. (How often that unfortunate lad came a cropper in those pages!) The consonants brought with them a whole family and idyllic scenes of village life.

Sounding out the letters as my grandfather taught me, I breathed uncomprehending, faltering life into those strange, enchanting words, like birdsong.

Tsvin’-tsvirin’ — na suku,
Na hillyatsi — ku-ku,
T’okh-t’okh — u sadochku,
Ku-ku-ri-ku na pen’ochku.

And yet, no matter how many times I repeated them, with all the single-mindedness that a child of eight can muster, the lines refused to render to me their precise meanings. Still, undeterred, I imagined a boyhood passed in the rustic tranquillity of that picture-book — one not too dissimilar from my own. The peasant huts, the livestock, the croft farm with its thatched cottages, the quaint village with its brick school and wooden church, the brook with its straw-hatted fisherman, the birds, the beehives and even, hidden among the rushes, a fearsome beetle with jet-black wings and a lone toad perched serenely atop a lily pad.

Here is Papa. Here is Mama. Here are our grandparents, and here are we, my grandfather translated. The familiar, unchanging rhythm of generations.

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Of course, it had all been a grotesque fiction. I leaf through those drawings of geese and cattle now and am reminded of the stories he told, always matter-of-factly, of the two-years’ famine — how, as a child of six, he had walked from one village to the next, not another living thing in sight, how in winter he had journeyed 250 miles through snow with his brother, by foot and on sledge, to find food in the city. I look at the happy children on their way to church. We walk to church, the print reads. At church we pray to God. But how well I know that the churches had been desecrated, that his church was but a darkened back room, where at night he and his mother whispered prayers for fear that between their lips and the Almighty’s ear the ever-vigilant state was eavesdropping. There we kiss the holy icons… I turn the page. What would we do without Father and Mother? the words ask. Who would take care of us? At fifteen, my grandfather lost both his parents, along with all four of his brothers: taken to Germany as a slave and granted liberty in England at the war’s end, he never saw or heard from them again. Such was the cost of his deliverance. I turn again. Never shall I forget my own Ukrainian language — a cursive fiction, for it was scarcely his to begin with. Untaught, he never learnt to distinguish his mother’s Ukrainian from his father’s Russian, forever mixing one with the other, until at last, having made a home in exile, he forgot them both.

A quarter-century has passed since I was given this book. Time in which I have grown and he has died. Time in which those letters have at last surrendered to me their meaning — but a bitter one. I close and lay aside this woeful fiction, but, as I do, one final detail assails me. I look again at those teal boards and notice for the first time the year: 1958. A terrible sense of pity wrenches me, as I see no longer the child but a man my own age. Illiterate even then — another vestige of a youth passed in the horrors of the last century. Hesitantly, he picks up this ABC, this bukvar, drawing his lips to repeat those nonsense words: Tsvin’-tsvirin’…

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Bryan Karetnyk is a Wolfson Scholar at University College London. He has translated several major works by the émigré author Gaito Gazdanov, including The Spectre of Alexander Wolf (2013) and The Flight (2016), and is the editor and chief translator of the anthology Russian Émigré Short Stories from Bunin to Yanovsky (2017), which was shortlisted for the Read Russia Prize.