Nina Kossman – ‘Born Too Late to Remember’

In 1995 I visited my cousin Vera in a London hospital, which struck me as a pleasant and welcoming place, despite it being a hospital, or maybe precisely because it was a hospital, but not the kind of sterile place that American hospitals, as well as American hotels, usually seemed to me, sterile and too new, made of glass and aluminum and a lack of human warmth, the quality which I associate with old buildings, even if none of those who once resided in them possessed ample amounts of this essential feeling.

My cousin Vera was sixteen years older than I and had known me as a child during her annual trips to the Soviet Union with her parents, both of whom loved the USSR with the blind passion of foreign tourists and armchair liberals, and although it would have been more correct to call them travelling Communists than armchair liberals, the difference would have been lost on us who had been grinding the daily bread of Communism for too long and for whom both travel and liberalism were attributes of the free world to which we did not belong; they were luxuries which only denizens of the free world could afford.

“I remember you coming back from school in your young pioneer’s uniform, Ninotchka,” Vera said to me, soon after we came in and exchanged whatever greetings were possible after a hiatus of more than half a lifetime. We pulled up our chairs close to her bed. “A little girl in a black dress with an Octyobryonok’s star,” she said. “You’d take your school books from your portfel’, and sit down quietly with your homework. And now look at you, you’re a grownup woman, coming from New York, visiting me in a London hospital.”

Something of that schoolgirl in a black dress must have stayed in me, because I let Vera, who was the older one, in addition to being a successful academic, author of many books, a chronic patient and a Londoner, talk, and I did not argue or interrupt her even when her words touched a raw nerve in me, and it was only later that some of her statements returned to haunt me and still later formed themselves into a question which I would have asked her if she were still alive, but ten years after our meeting at her hospital bedside–the time it took for the question to crystallize in my mind–Vera was dead. Not of the aneurysm, which was the main reason she had been hospitalized in ’95, and which she believed she had inherited from our grandfather, Stephan Kossman, who had died in Riga, blind and bankrupt but ultimately lucky that he died of natural causes without knowing what was yet to come. “Not of the aneurysm,” I said, this being the only time I contradicted my cousin Vera, and she said, shrugging, so that her hospital gown slid down and revealed part of her thin shoulder, “Then of what?” “Nobody could diagnose his disease,” I said. I remember my father telling me that, even though our grandmother took her husband to see Latvia’s best doctors, none could help, and one night my father, then a thirteen-year-old, woke up from a dream, walked into his parents’ bedroom, and found his father dead.

They loved each other very much, Vera said of her mother and my father; they never lost that childhood bond that some siblings develop, even though they lived so far from each other and so rarely met as adults. They even had the same gestures and same lack of understanding of what wasn’t right to say in the children’s presence. “For instance,” she said brightly, sidling up closer to the edge of the bed and letting her legs dangle close to the floor. “For instance,” she repeated, “the first time we came to the Soviet Union. It was the fifties,” she said. “You weren’t born yet, and Irene and I were children. We thought we were almost teenagers but we were children nevertheless. And the two of them sitting at a table in that kitchen, across from each other, their chins jutting forward, the chins they inherited from their mother, our grandmother Ruth, and mommy would say a name of a relative, each name a question, and after each name, your father said, Killed. Killed. Killed. And both were crying, absolutely oblivious to our presence. Unaware that we were listening to this. That we were taking it all in. That we were kids, after all, kids, kids, kids! And kids should not be exposed to what we had been exposed to that day.”

My cousin Vera sounded so perfectly convinced, and her diction, which was so perfectly British, so lightly carried a hint of its superiority over my mumbled words, that for a very brief moment I almost agreed with her. But even as I was sitting at her bedside, even then I was beginning to discern the selfishness which was the norm for my generation as well as hers, and which would not even be seen as selfishness by most members of my generation, for whom entitlement is as natural as mother’s milk—or an enriched formula. What I see as the selfishness of our generation, and not just the selfishness of my cousin, who actually belonged to a generation before mine but was no less imbued with these notions, is the inability to bow down to the much greater pain of our parents, and not only the inability to bow down—nobody really asked that of us!—but even the inability to look at it because looking at it, seeing it might mean merging with it, and merging is something we cannot allow to happen, because it would cause us psychological discomfort, because boundaries between individuals must be observed, because we have a right to protect ourselves from another’s pain, and if we are adults rediscovering or, as the case may be, reinventing our childhood traumas, we have a right to be indignant at the indiscretion of our caretakers whose duty was to protect us from anything that would mar our psychological landscape.

In 2005 Vera died, not of the aneurysm but of a heart attack, and since I never went back to England and we did not keep in touch, I never did ask her the question which, in my mind, was no longer a question, since I knew the answer. Even if she had been alive, I doubt that I would have presented her with this answer which used to be a question, because it would have been tantamount to accusing her of selfishness–and not only her, but her generation, my generation, the whole world. And what’s the use of accusing the world of its various sins, when the thing that you actually must do is quietly fish out of oblivion those that are yours, and to whom you owe this one thing, memory.

But I was born too late to remember.

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Nina Kossman, a Jewish refugee from the former Soviet Union, is a bilingual poet, memoirist, playwright, short story writer, novelist, and artist. She has authored, edited, or both edited and translated nine books of poetry and prose. Her work has appeared in over ninety magazines and anthologies and has been translated into many languages, including French, Italian, Greek, Hebrew, Spanish, Danish, Dutch, Persian, Albanian, Chinese, and Japanese. She received several awards and fellowships, including an NEA fellowship, and grants from the Foundation for Hellenic Culture, the Onassis Public Benefit Foundation, and Fundación Valparaíso. Her plays have been produced in several countries. She lives in New York.