That New Year was special for me. I met him with my beloved cousins. We gathered at one of them, Elena Levin, née Zarudnaya.
There is a Christmas tree in the house, which means that this house is Russian, although it is located in Massachusetts.
Americans are already removing Christmas trees for the New Year. Even if they celebrate, this holiday is not connected with the smell of pine needles and candles.
In a few days, Lena will turn 94. Her older sister (the author of a book about their family) is already 97, and there are also two younger ones, to whom these two are strict and patronizing. Once there were six of them, but one of the sisters and the only brother have already left.
Previously, if Lena needed something, she called the eldest, she got behind the wheel and came.
So it was fifty, and two years ago, but now it has become difficult. And it became difficult to run the house. But since recently, two wonderful Russian women have been living with Lena.
They came from Arkhangelsk, having read that same book about the Zarudnys, and performed a miracle: from a lonely, sad, poorly oriented American university lady, they turned into a calm, intelligent Russian old woman with a good knowledge of English.
Candles are burning on the Christmas tree, as in childhood, and the four Zarudny girls look at the lights.
The spines of Nabokov’s books (if you open them, you will see the author’s dedication) and many others, and even Trotsky’s memoirs in the English translation of Lena (“You know, he is so terrible, so terrible, but when I translated everything, I feel so sorry for him has become!»).
And the lights are still burning — and we look at them like children
I sit with them by the Christmas tree, admiring their neat gray heads, enjoying their old Russian language.
From time to time, one of the kind assistants says (just like in a Soviet kindergarten!): “And now Lena will read “Moroz the Governor” to us!”
And in a happy, clear voice without the slightest accent, Lena reads poetry with expression. When and where did she teach them? At a school in Omsk, where fate threw them, or maybe in Harbin (the emphasis on the last syllable was the custom there), where she graduated from school? ..
— And now Katya will tell us about Morozko.
Katya, who has a PhD in biology, smiles shyly. She is 84, but with older people she is always small and a little shy.
And the lights are still burning — and we look at them like children. And there are reflections of their distant childhood in pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg, and the Ural village, where the day before the birth of Katya, the whites kicked their family out of the house, and Omsk, where their mother was shot by the Reds, and the Tula village, where their nanny Manya, who saved everyone, was from six orphaned children, and Harbin, where they were helped by a relative, the daughter of the artist Albert Benois.
And all their American Christmas trees with husbands still alive and small children, and Soviet and post-Soviet Christmas trees in Arkhangelsk, and all mine, among which there is even one Kremlin one. But it doesn’t compare to this one.
— And now…
Yes, yes, I will read poetry too. At the tree. What happiness.