All I could remember was how we had walked hand in hand along the cobblestoned streets of old town in Stockholm when she was fifteen and I was twenty-five and nobody knew when the war was going to end and she took a bite of the red apple and looked up at me with a curious smile and asked why it was that Leo Tolstoy never got the Nobel Prize?
“The Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship”
a short story by
L. J. Lundblad
December 2010-July 2011
Посвящается Кате — со-филологу и моему другу.
[Dedicated to Katya – a fellow philologist and my friend.]
«Но главное — независимость!
Делать, что хочу, — жить, как хочу,
никого не спрашиваясь, ничего ни от кого не требовать,
ни в ком, ни в ктом не нуждаться! Я так хочу жить!»
“But the most important – independence!
To do what I want, – to live like I want,
not asking anyone, not demanding anything from anyone,
not needing anyone, not anyone! That's how I want to live!”
I.
“Professor Ihre,” a student knocks softly on the door to her office. As the woman sitting in front of the large desk by the window doesn’t look up, the student enters with soundless steps over the thick carpet. Even in the year 1955, being called professor Ihre doesn’t catch her attention immediately. Still she regards the title as well as the last name to be not quite hers. For the title she worked many years; the last name was stolen through marriage.
“Oh it’s you,” she greets the student with a polite smile. “Please, have a seat.”
Somewhat relieved, the student sits down. “I found this book,” the student starts and places a worn edition on the wooden surface between them. “It is something as rare as a book on linguistics published in the Soviet Union in 1928 by a female scholar.”
Professor Ihre takes the book into her hands and opens it. “That is rare indeed.”
“I did some research, and this woman received her doctorate from the same university in Kazan where you studied in the 1920s.”
Professor Ihre looks at the student with surprise: “How did you know I studied in Kazan?”
As if caught in an act of indecency, the student blushes: “It is on public university records. Anybody can access that kind of information.”
This explanation seems to satisfy professor Ihre and the student continues: “And so I wanted to ask if you perhaps you met...” the student appears to be refreshing the name of the female scholar “...Ilona Bergman? Did you by any chance know her while you were in the same department?”
Professor Ihre opens the old book on the page after the title and before the introduction; on this page, there is a small dedication in italics. Holding the book open before the student, she points at the tiny print: “You know Russian, don’t you? Read this out loud for me.”
“To Katya Rozalskaya – a fellow philologist and my friend,” the student reads.
Professor Ihre laughs; because she rarely laughs – if ever – her laughter is followed by silence on both parts.
“At the time when Ilona published this, I was twenty-three years old and I wasn’t Katya Rozalskaya anymore,” professor Ihre begins. “I had been Mrs. Trachtenberg since I married a professor of geology with that last name at the age of eighteen. He was some thirty years my senior and made me a widow at twenty-two. It was a common fate among women in my generation: marriage not an option, but a requirement. I was seventeen when my mother informed me of this decision. I didn’t like professor Trachtenberg, but I knew him. Don’t confuse my mother for an old-fashioned despot – she was far from. She knew what kind of a curious daughter she had raised, and told me that if I wanted to enter the university next year, I must marry a man who will support such a choice. Professor Trachtenberg supported it,” she concludes with a smile.
“So you know her?
“Katya Rozalskaya,” professor Ihre states firmly, “was the one who knew Ilona Bergman.”
“What kind of name is that, anyway? It doesn’t sound very Russian. Is she Jewish? Or Finnish?”
“Swedish,” professor Ihre answers. “Ilona was Swedish.”
The student hesitates for a moment: “That seems to be an odd fate for a Swedish girl, to go to post-revolutionary Russia for her doctorate degree...”
Suddenly professor Ihre laughs again while flipping through the yellow, thin pages of the book. “That wasn’t the oddest thing about her fate.” She looks up from the book and straight at the student. “I guess it will be instructive for you to learn something about the history of women in academia. Perhaps you would like to hear the story of the first female linguist?”
“You did know her?”
“Even the more whimsical sex doesn’t dedicate a serious scientific publication to anyone,” professor Ihre smiles. “Ilona and I were friends. Maybe she was the best friend I ever made.”
“She’s... diseased?”
Professor Ihre closes the book. “We met on September 1st thirty years ago. At the time I was twenty and she was twenty-five. In the same fall of 1925, Ilona told me what she wanted to have written on her gravestone: It is boring on this earth, ladies and gentlemen! Twelve years later, she was sentenced to be shot. She wasn’t executed in the purges of 1937, however, for later that year she was on a ship to Kolyma. I know this but I don’t know how or when she died; I know there never was any quote from Gogol on the mass grave in which she was eventually buried.”
“That’s a tragic way to go,” the student almost whispers.
“It was common in those days. Intellectual foreigners were among the first to go when the Soviet regime tightened its ideological belt.” Professor Ihre rises up from her chair and walks over to one of the bookshelves. From behind the collected works of Anton Chekhov she pulls out a green bottle of red wine. Two glasses she retrieves from a drawer in the desk. “If I am to tell you her story, it needs to be done in the company of some good Georgian liquids. I know it is not the tradition in this country.”
“Professor Ihre, I don’t know if I should...”
She opens the bottle. “You should call me Katya. Like Ilona did. I never was any Mrs. Ihre and I am certainly no professor Ihre. That was the man we were both married to. All three of us could have been professor Ihre, or at least we should have all been fighting for the right to that prestigious title. This,” she raises her glass and so does the student, “is a toast to the three professors Ihre that should have been in the history of academia.” They drink. “Except she never carried his name; when they got married, it was his family’s one request – that she refrain from taking his name.”
“Who was he?”
“His name was Ingmar Ihre. A nobleman. An aristocrat, as well as a professor of history at Stockholm University. Well, he wasn’t professor yet when he married her; back then he was but an ambitious student of wealthy origins. They married during the first war, in 1916. She was sixteen and he was twenty-six. It wasn’t uncommon to enter into holy matrimony that young at the time. Since, naturally, social conceptions have changed – for the better.”
“Why didn’t his family want her to take his name?”
“Because Ilona was a teenage prostitute who had come to the big city from an impoverished village with her alcoholic father at the age of twelve.”
The student stares at the book on the table between them. “The woman who wrote this – one of the most innovate studies on cognitive linguistics at the time – was a prostitute?”
“She used to say she was like Sonja from Crime & Punishment, except in her case when Raskolnikov failed to show up, Ingmar did. She didn’t speak much about first life with me. Most of what I know I learned from Ingmar when I met him again in Sweden in 1934.”
“Again?”
“He visited Kazan in 1929, shortly after the infamous incident with which Ilona truly made the history of our profession and simultaneously the history of our sex. In the fall semester of 1929, she became the first woman in academia to be expelled from her position as lecturer at a university,” Katya says with a broad smile.
“For what?”
“For intoxication in public. In connection to this, she was also wearing pants and smoking a cigar. The new world might have wanted to appear brave, but for a provincial city like Kazan this kind of frivolous behavior was a bit too much.” Katya takes a sip of her wine and continues to smile. “At the time I was too young; I didn’t understand her. I couldn’t fathom how one person can live each time differently and every time like it is a separate life.
“After the second war, I moved to the United States. By then I had parted with my best friend in 1934, raised a daughter in Sweden, and buried my second husband in 1943. Yet only in the year 1953 did I understand that I myself had lived three different lives: in my twenties, I was a student of philology in Kazan; in my thirties, I was the wife of a nobleman in Stockholm, and in my forties, I was a professor in a suburb of Los Angeles. All these lives were connected to her; to all of the places I have been and in all of the roles I have played, I was led by Ilona.”
II.
On September 1st 1925 I was a third year student at Kazan University’s Department of Philology. At this point Ilona was doing research for her dissertation under the supervision of a prominent linguist (it is not necessary for me to mention his name to you; he is famous enough and his reputation will – perhaps it already has – outlive himself). She was always married. Then again, this social status was compulsory for us at the time as women then were scarcely given entrance into higher education without first entering into holy matrimony. She did not wear a ring. She never spoke of her husband. He was sometimes mentioned by people sharing our surroundings. Some might have been as drastic as to doubt him real, had not her affluent financial situation confirmed them of her status as a kept woman.
Once I was brave enough to ask her about him. This was at the very onset of our friendship.
“I was married at the age of sixteen,” she answered and added: “I have not seen him since I moved from Stockholm to Petrograd at the age of eighteen. This is all I am ever intended on uttering on the subject, not a single word more.”
“It will be easy anyway for me to find out more about him and who he is,” I argued, “after all, his last name is also yours.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, Katya,” she smiled. “His family agreed to our wedding on one term: that I never wear his last name. He is of noble family of course.”
I met Ilona frequently, almost on a daily basis, during the several years when we both belonged not only to the same university and the same department but also worked with the same professor. Ilona was a woman of outstanding qualities: with an extraordinary agreeable exterior and an intellect almost intimidating in its vibrant and vast caliber, she had come not only to hold the university in the palm of her hand, but also all of Kazan proper. She always looked younger than she was. Never did I consider her to be five years my senior for she treated me as her equal. There was something helplessly childish about her fragile frame when lost in silent thought, yet when she spoke her entire appearance became saturated with moral strength and brilliant aptitude. Her powerful voice expanded her slight size. Without words, though, she appeared awfully tiny and seemed solely pretty and rather insignificant to that; this failed to bother her.
Over the years I have noticed that tall men and beautiful women share this specific trait of personality – the serenity that comes from already having satisfied society’s prime superficiality.
Ilona was the first woman I saw wearing pants and smoking at the university. One afternoon I was reached by the shocking rumor she had lit a cigarette at a banquet held for and by the town’s communist elite and that she there even made an attempt to enter into the men’s room, where she asked to be served a drink. Someone presented her with a glass of whiskey and she downed it immediately. Independent behavior such as this by a woman in academia was unheard of both in the early 20th century and in the young Soviet Union’s provincial towns – thus, she always knew how to cause a scandal.
More often than not she was forgiven on the grounds of being a foreigner.
In 1929, Ilona initiated an even bigger scandal in polite society at the beginning of her second year as assistant professor. She had defended her dissertation on cognitive linguistics in April the year before (it was published as a book – the proof of this you’re holding in your hand). At twenty-nine, she was granted a title most men had to work much harder and quite a bit longer before achieving; she made the effort itself seem trivial. Ilona was the kind of woman who would read dictionaries when bored (she always was) or learn celebrated pieces from Mayakovsky’s novel and fashionable poetry by heart. She was easily bored. In her boredom she would relentlessly evoke numerous love affairs and just as many transitory sexual relations with men from all walks of life – the only man with whom she maintained a distant and exclusively professional relationship was her aforementioned professor. Yet her promiscuity was never the reason for any scandal. It was as if the men of Kazan had agreed to overlook it; perhaps secretly wishing she would pick them when the time came for her next amorous adventure.
She caused scandals by smoking cigars, drinking alcohol, playing cards, and wearing pants at the university; in other words, every time when she decided to play her favorite part – that of a man. Whenever a scandal was provoked – and the older she became (by that I mean mature), the more frequent they were – she was given an official reprimand, most commonly by the dean or even the principal sometimes, after which she was forced to publicly repent.
Such punishments left her unbothered as she remained unabashed. The only measurement she took was that of citing Lermontov: “If people reasoned more then they would become convinced that life isn’t worth to be cared all that much about.” Only years later did I realize this is from A Hero of Our Time…
In the fall of 1928, when she had been made possessor due to a freshly acquired doctor’s degree and I was twenty-two and still at the same process’s first step, she happened to be present in the university canteen when I was informed of my first husband’s death. He had previously been a professor of geology at the same university but gone away with an expedition to the northern Urals three years prior. Before leaving he had urged me to seek intimacy with someone else in his absence. He suggested that perhaps I may locate myself a new happiness in a man closer to my age, for he was uncertain a return would materialize. Such were our tumultuous 20s. However, he could not provide me with a divorce (that would have been shameful and in bad taste and against all norms of decent society). Ilona was the last person to approach me that day in the canteen. She sat down next to me after everyone else had left in a gesture of reverence before the grieving young widow. She took my hand and held it for a couple of minutes before anyone of us spoke. I broke the silence:
“I haven’t seen him for three years. I barely saw him when we shared a home. Did you know we hadn’t even been married for a year before he went to the Urals?”
She pondered my words for a while. Then she smiled at me: “Married for almost an entire year without conceiving a child? In the eyes of family and society, this must have been a dreadfully unsuccessful union.”
I also smiled. And our eyes met.
“My husband,” she began, “asked only one thing of me when I at the age of seventeen informed him of my decision to pursue higher education in Russia: first, provide me with a child. It didn’t come to be, even though we spent our last year together trying. Yet he was possessed by the idea that I might have left Sweden carrying his child without knowing it. He pestered me with letters for months. Despite my assuring him repeatedly that his suspicions were not grounded in any reality, that I was not hiding his child from him, he still sent his most trusted servant to Petrograd to make sure of it. His servant first gave me a severe beating and secondly raped me.”
“He did what…?”
She laughed – a cold, almost metallic laughter: “And what is funny about this story is that I gave birth to a daughter nine months later.”
“What happened to her?”
She looked me in the eyes at length before speaking: “I gave her the same name I myself had been denied – my first and his last – and left her at an orphanage in Petrograd.” Ilona shivered as if suddenly cold; then the motion morphed into a shrugging of her shoulders. “I was nineteen. She’ll be nine years in a month… If she’s still alive, that is.”
“You don’t want to know where she is? You don’t care if she’s alive or dead?”
Ilona disapproved of such questions. It was obvious for she frowned for a while before abruptly snapping: “Katya, it was revenge. Don’t you understand? Can’t you see this was an indispensable sacrifice? Have you not yet realized that we as women have to sacrifice almost all of our lives to even have something left to call a life? Don’t you recognize how in this society we’re marginalized, how we’re pushed into corners, how we’re kept from becoming anything at all, lest – God forbid! – we might surpass our husbands, brothers, fathers? If we are not so lucky as to have mothers inclined on enlightening us, then we have no other option but becoming a man’s possession – a man we despise and who despises us – all for the right to an occupation other than blowing children’s noses, swiping floors, and tending to the other’s sexual fancies. What woman in her right mind would write a hymn to a man, or even a song, let alone a poem about him? You need only have seen one man’s naked and sweaty and hairy body move above you in bed to know that no words – no matter how inconsequential or phonetically displeasing they may be – deserve the fate of being used for that purpose. We come from a long line of suffering, pain, and endurance. I chose not to have any of it. Instead, I chose independence. As limited as my choices were – this I grasped at the age of fourteen when I first met my husband – I chose science. Someone can always leave, someone will constantly change, but someTHING eternally remains. As women we must always love someTHING more than someone, or else we are chained to caring for the present human kind while simultaneously bringing up its future. Yet we ourselves own nothing save our past. This past must be left behind like you leave the air you’ve already breathed, without as much as thought of doing it differently. I hope that the future will bring a new mankind, one differing from what we currently have at our disposal. If you want to know why I chose not to raise my daughter, then I should tell you that it was not because she is the product of sexual abuse. I left for I do not wish for her to ever see her mother in the kitchen. And my actions so far have made sure of it.”
At the time none of us suspected that in the spring of 1935 I would come to take Ilona’s place in her daughter’s life. At the time I said nothing.
“I would advise us not to elaborate further on this topic,” she concluded. “Instead, use this time to focus on yourself. Now you are a young widow. It is only mandatory to wear mourning the first year. If I were you, I would not wear it at all. If I were you, I would remove the wedding ring tonight and pawn it tomorrow, cut my hair short and show up at the university wearing pants and smoking a cigar. I promise you, if you do then so will I.”
She didn’t cut her hair short; instead she wore it out, letting the long strands of blonde hair fall freely along her back all the way down to her waist. I did cut my hair short, like a boy. I never put on any black dress. A week after my husband’s death I sold the ring and bought myself a lovely pair of pants, together with several bottles of expensive brandy and quite a few boxes of cigars and cigarillos. At the following banquet organized for members of the town’s absolute elite – to which Ilona and I belonged in part owing to membership in the Party (you seem surprised; back then we were all good communists), in part owing to education – we both showed up wearing pants instead of dresses. We invited ourselves to the company of men and lit our own cigars with them. The dean of our department, who was present in the room at this time, immediately recognized it as his duty to inform us that our presence there was superfluous. At this Ilona only nodded, for she knew that he had mainly directed the information toward me, though clearly speaking to the both of us. Later we were escorted off the premises entirely; several male professors present had made it publicly known that she was drunk. Of course, with this I do not argue – she had indeed been intoxicated. A beauty such as herself, and in addition to this somewhat of a genius, could afford to display some of her peculiarities openly. They were tolerated when limited to smoking or wearing pants; drinking to the point of embarrassment for all those involved was not. Even for Ilona. She didn’t fight as they escorted her out, and I didn’t say a word while accompanying her. After I promised them to get her home safely we were presented with a car. It took us to the luxurious old building on the top floor of which she rented an elegantly furnished flat. I paid for the car and she took my hand as a sign that she wanted me to come with her.
Once the door to the flat closed behind us, she began to undress. I did the same and we soon found ourselves lying opposite each other on two silky sofas placed in front of each other with a low glass table between them. We were left wearing nothing but our underwear. She poured us two glasses of red wine and lit a cigarette before taking the first sip. There was no toast. She laughed for a long time, maybe even five minutes straight, trying all the while to tell me something… Finally her laughter softened enough for the words to become audible:
“Here I am: lying on a sofa in a flat where everything has been paid for by him! Simply because he once gave into a fleeting feeling of affection for a poor little girl walking the streets barefoot on an afternoon in July! Katya, I grew up without anything. Katya, did you know I came to Stockholm from the countryside when I was twelve? And that I was almost immediately initiated into the profession of selling my body so as to provide for a father crippled by alcoholism? I was Sonja in Crime and Punishment, only in my life Raskolnikov failed to turn up… Instead I met him. And do you know what the worst part is, Katya? He wasn’t a good man or even a kind man and certainly not anyone I would ever refer to as my savior, for he was just a ridiculously rich, little lonely and entirely inexperienced customer. He felt pity for me, which is understandable as I was fourteen and deprived of everything. He fell in love with me… Or maybe he only desperately wanted to love a woman and chose to love me,” she said and stopped for a moment: “But it seems I am forgetting myself. Did I not promise you not to speak a word more about him?”
I nodded; yet she went on.
“The story of my life goes as follows: country girl moves to big city and becomes prostitute. Prostitute meets aristocrat and aristocrat marries her against family and society. Then she leaves for Russia and some ten years later has acquired a fancy academic degree, while living somewhere deep inside this country… where he can’t ever touch me again!” And Ilona laughed.
“Tell me about him,” I asked.
“He was…” she bit her lower-lip, as if in hesitation, “he is a nobleman, belonging to a family of considerable wealth and reputation. When I met him on that afternoon in July he was twenty-four. I do believe he is still ten years older than me… which would make him thirty-eight now! Oh my… Last thing I heard, about a year or so ago, he had been awarded membership in the Swedish Academy of Sciences. Already when I met him he was teaching at the university. About at the time I left Sweden – when I was eighteen and we had been married for almost two years – he started writing his dissertation…” She stopped, not possessing the information that should come next in this narrative. Instead she added: “His name is Ingmar. Ingmar Ihre.”
And so I asked: “What does Ingmar look like?”
“Ah you know, the usual: horribly handsome, terribly tall, boldly blonde, bravely bearded, ghastly green-eyed and victim of a weakness for women.”
I laughed. At the time it never occurred to me that I would ever meet Ingmar in person; or her daughter – Ilona Ihre – for that matter.
The following Monday she was officially informed of the instantaneous expulsion from her newly acquired position as a lecturer at the university. Our dean stated her recent indecent conduct in public as the main motivation; she was deemed unfit to teach and told to surrender her office immediately. She was allowed to remain an active participant in the scientific research conducted by our professor, but her presence was no longer welcomed at the department. The scandal made not only the contemporary papers, but also history: Ilona became the first female teacher at an institution of higher education to be suspended from practicing her profession.
Two weeks later, I met her Swedish husband: the prosperous nobleman, the academy member, and the respected intellectual for the first time. It was in the beginning of October. Ingmar had spent a month at the University of Petrograd as a visiting scholar while simultaneously guest-lecturing at the Russian Academy of Sciences. His appearance in Kazan was not rumored until a few days prior to his arrival; apparently, the celebrated scholar had unexpectedly decided to share his expansive wisdom also with provincial scientists. Professor Ihre was the full embodiment of Ilona’s sarcastic description of him – an attractive man of grand stature with broad shoulders and quite a few silver streaks in both hair and beard; he carried himself like a man who knew his own worth. Ilona acted surprised and giggled when he approached her. She pretended not to notice the stern look on his face.
“Ah Ingmar, there you are. This,” she put her right arm around my waist, “is my closest friend, Katya.”
After the reunion in public they soon departed for a private conversation in her apartment. The next day he left Kazan; when I met her then she had a fresh black eye that I didn’t have to ask about.
“The bastard tried to take revenge on me again,” was the explanation she gave without any inquiry on my part.
III.
“Katarina, you cannot understand what I felt that I had found when I found her. The first time I saw her standing there in the shade on that hot summer day, all I saw was this kid with bony knees under a ruffled skirt and a long braid of thick blonde hair, with some innocent freckles on her nose and cheeks; when we had agreed on the price and she brought me upstairs – she belonged to some sort of shady brothel – and we started to talk, I saw something quite else. She knew how to read. ‘In the village where I grew up I went to school,’ she told me. I explained to her that I was a student at the university. ‘I also want to study at the university when I get older,’ she said. At this I laughed; she remained perfectly composed: ‘What’s so funny about that? I’ve got a head on my shoulders just like you.’ I explained that to enter the university, one must finish school and pass exams. ‘I have an excellent memory,’ she argued, ‘and I read books all the time.’ At first it was merely a folly or perhaps some kind of an experiment; a way to pass the time for a young man stuck in a neutral country at the time of a world war. I didn’t take her seriously, yet I continued to bring her books every time I went to see her. I visited her on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Over the weekends and in the late evenings, she consumed every piece of literature I brought. That winter I invited her to my apartment one evening and introduced her to my circle of friends from the university. We were some twenty people – all men naturally – with various interests working in different scientific fields. At first, Ilona only listened. She soon became an indispensible part of our group and already the following spring she argued, discussed, spoke on the same terms as everyone else. I suppose we all wondered if she was not perhaps the brightest among us – and tried to laugh about it: a teenager, a prostitute, and a girl to that!
“Ilona never loved me, Katarina. It is a painful confession to make for an egocentric man such as myself who imagined he was loved for many years. She didn’t use me; I presented my services by free will and as such she took advantage of them. I was simply the means to her end. We were all fools; I was the greatest fool of all for I went down on one knee and begged her to make me her husband. We didn’t understand what we had created – rather, what we had cultivated for she was already a completed creation when I met her – until she received her diploma in the spring of 1917. One in our group taught at a school for underprivileged children and issued the certificate based on her excellent comprehension of the curricula. The same summer she passed the entrance exams to Stockholm University – better than any man before her. It was a fact, as well as a defeat and a victory at the same time; our pretty little Ilona understood more than we, serious men several years older, could ever aspire to grasp. It is not possible for a man to keep a woman like that to himself. It would have been selfish. I was selfish. This I didn’t comprehend for years; I understood it only when I saw her in Kazan.
“When I saw her in Kazan, Katarina, she was in my eyes the same young girl I had once lost my virginity to. All I could remember was how we had walked hand in hand along the cobblestoned streets of old town in Stockholm when she was fifteen and I was twenty-five and nobody knew when the war was going to end and she took a bite of the red apple and looked up at me with a curious smile and asked why it was that Leo Tolstoy never got the Nobel Prize? That was the girl I was looking to meet in Kazan. She wasn’t there. In the eyes of everyone else, Ilona was a beautiful grown woman fully in charge of her own fate. Looking back at the last time I spoke with her, I know now that I was there because I thought I would take her back home with me. ‘You know I will never return with you,’ she concluded. Instead, I left with the name and location of her daughter. Her I could bring back home with me.”
This Ingmar told me in the fall of 1934.
In January 1930, Ilona relocated to Tomsk. After a semester of forced academic inactivity, she had finally been granted the place of professor at a Siberian university. We wrote letters to each other; sometimes they would make it and at other times our correspondence was lost on the way to and from Siberia. In the summer of 1932, after defending my dissertation on new workers’ prose (don’t frown – it was as compulsory as it was fashionable at the time), I moved to Moscow to work at the recently founded Institute of World Literature. It was a prestigious position and I was happy to have been given it despite my youth and inexperience. It was about a year later when I met Ilona again; this time, she was working in a publishing house as an editor of dictionaries. Because of her scandalous past in Kazan it was impossible for her to find work in academia. She arrived in the company of a man – she was always in the company of some man or another – who had been a high government official in the far provinces and became but a minor manager at some state department in the capital. I don’t remember much of him; as their relationship was limited in time, we only met a few times. When their marriage was objected on the grounds of her previous matrimonial union still in effect, they soon parted ways. She argued that she had not seen her first husband since 1918 – there was a law at the time which stated that if the spouses had been apart for more than seven years, there was no need for a formal divorce – but somebody informed somebody else of Ingmar’s visit to Kazan in 1929. Since then only four years had passed. I don’t know who other than me in Moscow could have been in possession of this information; on the other hand, people with secret motives hiding while biding their time were abundant as well as frequent in the 30s.
For about a year we lived together in Moscow; she simply moved into my room in the communal apartment. We slept on the same sofa bed and worked at the same desk. Our cooperative existence in Moscow differed much from our privileged lives in Kazan: she no longer possessed any furnished flat – after his visit to Kazan, Ingmar no longer sent her any money – and the inheritance my first husband had left me was long gone. We fried potatoes for dinner and went to the market to buy fish and cabbage on the weekends; in the evenings, we read books in silence and then spoke for hours. It wasn’t long, however, before she had charmed the chair of the linguistics department at the Institute of World Literature where I worked. He provided her with two advantageous positions: the first as professor in his department and the second as mistress in his house. When I was invited to be a visiting scholar at Stockholm University for a semester, I didn’t think she would support my decision to go. Instead, she was the one who argued most fervently in favor.
“Katya, it is imperative to see something other than one’s native country. One must live elsewhere, breathe foreign air, meet new opinions and face other points of view. Passion without resistance cannot remain pure,” she said.
Ilona carried my suitcase to the train station on August 14th 1934. Before I boarded the train to Leningrad, she threw her arms around me and kissed me on the lips. “Now, Katya, your journey begins. Make sure it remains your own,” were her parting words. We both thought I would be back in late December and that we would embrace each other and kiss exactly like that once again – instead, it was the last I saw of both her and Moscow. I remember her standing on the platform wearing a red trench coat, holding an umbrella in one hand and waving to me with the other. I remember it was raining.
IV.
Many years have passed since that autumn day in 1955 when I found a book dedicated to Katya Rozalskaya in the university library; Professor Ihre’s young student has since grown up to become a professor in her own right. When Katya first met Ilona Ihre in the fall of 1934, she was a freckled fifteen year old girl with auburn curls wearing a short pink dress with puffy sleeves. When I first met the daughter of Ilona Bergman, she was already in her late sixties and her red locks had turned grey. She had never been married and that might have been the sole reason as to why I saw in the esteemed mathematician something more than simply an old woman with splendid posture and a deep voice who had managed to preserve the majestic beauty of her youth. After the war, Ilona Ihre had been an actress in London and Paris before eventually boarding the plane to New York.
“You want to know if I remember my mother,” she stated bluntly after a few minutes of polite conversation during which I had explained who I was and why I recognized her last name. “I remember her very well: she was a Russian Jew, her name was Katya and she was married to my father, Ingmar Ihre, a Swedish academic.”
“You have never heard of a woman called Ilona Bergman?” I asked and bit my lower-lip; perhaps I shouldn’t have posed the question as abruptly as I did.
Ilona Ihre laughed – a clear, somewhat metallic laughter: “Ah so you know more than I thought you did! Perhaps if you know about the woman who was really my mother, then you also know what happened to the man who was really my father?”
I shook my head: “I only know that he was one of Ingmar Ihre’s servants and that he…” I didn’t have to finish the sentence.
“You don’t know what happened on the night I was conceived?” Ilona Ihre raised one well-shaped eyebrow and looked at me with a curious smile. “I wasn’t told until the day of Ingmar’s funeral. I was twenty-four at the time and for twenty-four years I had thought myself to be the peculiarly reddish progeny of two blondes. Katya and I sat in our black dresses after everyone else had left the apartment in Stockholm – the evening was late and it was dark outside – and she began telling me the story. ‘Your mother is in a concentration camp somewhere in the Soviet Union as we speak,’ she started with that for she was never one for subtleties, ‘and she isn’t dead. I know this because sometimes mutual friends receive letters from her and when they do, they write to me.’ She handed me the letters; it appeared she had kept them prepared in a box for this particular occasion. ‘After your mother was raped by Ingmar’s best friend Tobias Rosenlund, she reached for the small hand gun she carried in her purse at all times and shot him in the neck as he was getting dressed.’ Tobias Rosenlund had acquired his visa to post-revolutionary Russia as a member of a Swedish theater group performing in Petrograd during the month of January 1919. My father was of course a natural redhead. I have since seen several pictures of him, some in color.”
“I never knew there was a murder in this story,” I almost whispered.
“Nobody knew but Katya. She was the only one who knew all of my mother’s secrets. Most of them she kept to herself; only what she was given permission to tell did she ever speak of. She even sent an invitation for my mother to join her in the United States after her release from concentration camp in 1951,” Ilona Ihre said.
“She never told me this.”
“Of course she didn’t. And she never would have told anyone she buried her best friend in Los Angeles in the spring of 1953. Shortly after Stalin’s death my mother obtained an exit visa and was reunited with Katya in California,” Ilona Ihre said with a somewhat strained smile. “My mother only breathed American air for a month before she died. It wasn’t until that summer when Katya sent me a picture of the two of them by the Golden Gate Bridge together with the address of the cemetery. At the time, I was living in New York. ‘I would have wanted to meet her,’ I wrote back. ‘She never asked about you,’ was the answer I received.” She suddenly laughed: “All I remember from seeing her grave was that there was some stupid citation from Russian literature on it. I don’t think I even cried.
“It seems I fought academia for so many years because I didn’t want to become yet another professor Ihre. But when you resist a passion that’s in your blood it only grows stronger, more pure,” professor Ihre concluded. “You should come see me sometimes. After all, we work in the same university – albeit in different departments.”
