In einer Nacht, woanders-One night, another place- by Katerina Poladjan.

This debut novel tells the story of Masha, living in Berlin, who gets a phone call one day out of the blue, telling her she must return immediately to Bykovo, near Moscow, to deal with the sale of her late grandmother’s house. Masha left Russia with her parents many years before, returning only once as a 16 year old to visit her gran. She feels completely thrown by this request—she’s not a home owner, has no idea how to go about selling a house—but gets leave from work and takes a plane, arriving in a country which is familiar from childhood, whose alphabet she can still just about decipher, but which feels alien, dark and many degrees colder than Berlin.

As she takes a taxi out to Bykovo and makes her way on foot, late at night, through the wood to the house, memories of her gran come flooding back: that clever, competent woman who worked in Space research, entertaining guests at her house among the silver birches, the vodka, the quarrels, the tears, her gran’s pursed lips the next day while stirring the porridge. When she arrives, it’s the smells that evoke vivid memories. I loved this:

es riecht nach alter Schokolade und den getragenen Strumpfhosen, die meine Großmutter abends über die Badewanne hängte wie zwei tote Blindschleichen.

It smells of old chocolate and the tights that my grandmother had worn and then hung over the bathtub in the evening like two dead slowworms. ( My translation)

Mingled with these are scarier childhood memories: the gruesome stories of robbers and murderers told her by Pjotr, her gran’s caretaker and friend, the red cockerel lollies sold on Ulitzki-Prospekt, the sugar boiled up in water the gypsies had washed their filthy feet in to wreak revenge on the White Russians. There’s a sort of dark Russian folk tale feel about some of these memories, which adds to the intensity of feeling as Masha looks through her gran’s possessions, which evoke the woman, but also her absence.

As the narrative progresses, in stream of consciousness style, we learn that Masha was brought up with her grandmother till the age of 10. Her mother fell pregnant by accident at the age of 17 and turned out to be flaky. After she left the baby in her pram in the park one day, it was decided that Masha should be brought up by Tamara, her gran. Masha continued seeing her parents, though it’s clear that Tamara was the competent, practical one, who also kept them afloat financially. There’s then a devastating scene when Masha’s parents tell Tamara that they’ve decided to go to the West, to have more freedom—this is 1982. Tamara pleads with them to leave her the child, but they refuse and leave for Germany.

This is all in snatched memories, scattered through the text, and memories of a child looking on at the adults at that. The memories continue as she recalls the first years in Germany: Masha desperate to fit in, to have the right schoolbag, embarrassed at her mother  making Piroschki for her birthday party when she’d have preferred Pommes und Pizza, her mother Lina putting on her best white dress for the party, desperate for approval, then spending the party in her bedroom. It becomes clear that Lina’s problems with coping became more serious. Masha’s more recent memories of her mother see her now in a clinic in Berlin, while her father is in New Zealand with his new family.

The character of Pjotr hoves into view some way into the book. He appears the morning after Masha’s arrival and says he has a buyer for the house. Matwej is a wealthy Muscovite who wants somewhere quieter out of Moscow, and after looking round the house and drinking a lot of vodka with Pjotr, is keen to buy. Memories of Pjotr come back to Masha: his ambiguous role as her gran’s employee, but also a friend of the family who’d known them all for many years. The narrative goes a bit surreal then, memories and reality become enmeshed. It would spoil to say too much, but Masha leaves in a hurry, returns to Berlin and goes directly to visit her mother in the clinic. There’s a very moving scene at the end when she lies down to sleep at her mother’s side.

 I read this book for German Literature Month, rather late in the day for the Second Helpings week. This is a second helping of Katerina Poladjan for me as I’d read her novel Zukunftsmusik—Music of the Future, shortlisted for the Leipzig Book Prize—in the spring of 2022 which I also really enjoyed. Set on one day in March 1985, far from Moscow, its protagonists are the residents of one Kommunalka, or shared flat, and we follow their individual stories on that day, in this period towards the end of the Soviet Union. As in In einer Nacht, woanders, we have a multigenerational family of women. We also have space research work called into question. But what I really enjoyed was that combination of skilful characterisation with the hinting, foreshadowing almost, of the crumbling of a way of life and the enormous upheavals that were to come.

Both of these novels really spoke to me and In einer Nacht, woanders will certainly appeal to all of us who go back to a place once known, once familiar, once loved, that we haven’t seen for many years. I could almost smell my grandmother’s floor polish as I read this book. When you read it, you’ll know what I mean.