Decades of silence…

To be honest, my grandfather Ari has always been more than tinged with a painful and complex set of unknowns. For a rather prodigious and curious little girl like me, grandparents were a curiosity and distant voice that mainly came in airmail letters… save the one grandparent I truly knew, and that was my grandmother, Delphine Leschnikova.

My mother’s parents, Lorna De Smidt and Keith Pulvermacher (divorced when Mum was ten and both remarried), had emigrated to South Africa from London in the 1950s, and save Lorna’s several years in London during 1960s, both saw their lives out in Johannesburg and Cape Town. I probably saw them both no more than four times. I will write about my mother’s family in another post because I inherit a lot of culture from them and come from a rather unique ancestry that informs my musical bent and my Jewish roots.

So I knew about all of my grandparents, and Delphine was central in mine and my sister’s upbringing. She was a loving grandma, unfortunately not beyond favouritism towards me, a point I wish my parents had seen more clearly and tackled head on early for my sister’s sake. I suppose Grandma felt closer to me because we both played the piano – she was a very talented pianist – her musicianship easily sat alongside Ari’s. That is a point that has seldom if ever been addressed when Ari is discussed or written about… she wasn’t just a talented dancer but trained to be a concert pianist as a young girl and earned a scholarship to the Paris Conservatoire as a pianist and ballet dancer. Sadly her mother stopped her from going, despite her French father having family living just south of Paris in Seine et Oise. This blockade on her birthright was never forgotten and she left home in London as soon as she could to work as a dancer, ending up in Paris and later Berlin.

Like lots of little girls and boys, I went to ballet classes and my grandma would often encourage me and teach me the proper forms when she visited us at home. I remember her chanting commands at me as I jumped and posed to Swan Lake… it was because of her that I can still stand in fifth position… since I was three!

It was also Delphine who bought me my first piano… it cost her 50 pounds which was quite a sum for a pensioner. Elmore and Sons was the make and the poor thing was always around a quarter tone flat. Our piano tuner simply couldn’t risk tuning it up to A440 because he feared the strings would break. I had A440 perfect pitch before we got the piano and this was gradually bent into a flat version until my parents bought me another piano when I was 12. Amazingly I never sang flat and when i played violin briefly I never played flat, thank G-d!

It was when I started singing properly when I was 3 years old that I first remember my Grandma saying something about my mysterious 4th grandparent, Ari. I was in my bedroom, standing on a chair at a tall chest of drawers, pulling off lavender buds from some fronds I’d picked from our back garden, singing my heart out – improvising, so nothing in particular. I could hear a bit of a raised murmur of my Grandma and my parents, but thought nothing of it… When i went downstairs my Grandma Delphine came to me and hugged me to her saying, with trembling emotion, ‘I can hear your Grandfather Ari in your voice!’ She had tears in her eyes and I felt a strong tug on my heart at this. My father Simeon was sitting with my mother Ann… he had this look in his eyes – a far away stare that I later realised throughout his life was when he was transported to his memories of his father, Ari, and a life I didn’t know anything about, except that my long and very ‘foreign’ last name came from Bulgaria. For as long as I can remember, I had a sense that we were different to other families – not so much because we were ethnically diverse, having grown up in a multi cultured, but very racist greater London. No… it wasn’t that… there was an undertow to something in my family that I couldn’t name until I was four years old.

I woke early one summer morning on hearing someone moving about downstairs and went to investigate. I found my father sitting on the sofa in the living room with his hands covering his face – he was sobbing silently. I moved forward and put my hand on his shoulder and asked him, “Daddy, what’s wrong – why are you crying?” He had already turned to look at me and drew me into his arms saying, “Nothing for you to worry about darling. After hugging me for a few moments he picked me up and took me back to my bed, sitting with me until I went to sleep. Later that morning when my Mum came into my room, she told me I had to extra specially quiet today because Daddy was in bed and needed to sleep. We went downstairs and while she sat with me for my breakfast, I asked her why my father had been crying earlier that morning. My mother must have known that like so many children, I would know if I was being fobbed off with a different explanation to the truth. And so she simply told me that my father had just found out that his father had died and he was very sad. I felt a sudden tug at my heart for my father – just as I had earlier that morning. But then a question arose that I asked – why didn’t we see my grandfather or have letters from him even? Again, my mother pragmatically answered that he lived a long way away in Bulgaria and wasn’t allowed to leave the country because a small number of very bad people didn’t let ordinary Bulgarians travel abroad. And here lay the beginning of the undertow that has stayed with me my entire life – the silence, the questions unanswered and the mysterious figure of my grandfather, who slipped in and mainly out of hushed family conversations over the years.

Perhaps twice