In "She's from Mariupol", she strives to unearth her mother's encounters in the war, telling the life of the Mariupol laborers who are responsible for the daily maintenance of the concentration camp, taking the family search as the starting point, and the intersection of personal feelings and ethnic destinies. "The Man in the Shadows" is the second part of the trilogy, father chapter.
"She's from Mariupol"
The core of the work is still "memory", and the work has two main lines, starting from the death of the father, one is to reconstruct the life of the father, and the other is the life of the author when he was a teenager. The focus of the two lines is "identity", as the embarrassing situation of Ukrainian-Russian refugees in Germany, the "father chapter" connects the "mother chapter", re-examining the gender relations and family feelings in the war. The remembrance of the past and the complex situation lead personal memories out of the bunker, lead out of the shadows of micro history, and make them public.
The death of a father is an end and a beginning. As a daughter, Natasha must return to the place where she had been behind her for years, to the man she was called "father", and although he was dead, his identity as "father" and her identity as "daughter" would never change. Death, as a wake-up call, requires Natasha to confront those unforgettable past events, and then to approach the psychological motives behind her father's actions and actions in those past events.
This awakening is also out of Natasha's instinct, the voyeurism of being a writer. Just as she had not been looking for someone on a Russian engine by chance, she had long had the idea of writing about her mother's origins, a woman who had lived in Ukraine before she was born and had spent time in a German labor camp. A similar thought led to the birth of Man in the Shadows, where Natasha needed a textual voice that would allow her to identify directions.
"She is from Mariupol" is full of question marks, the mother's lineage and the history of her family, a question mark after a question mark, a little revealed, but the narrator's description is not necessarily accurate and fair, everyone has their own position, emotional tendencies and ways of thinking, the transmission process of speech will be biased, memory may also be wrong, this is like a puzzle that cannot be returned, some fragments are lost forever, some are altered beyond recognition, "The Man in the Shadows" is a similar situation, you can never be sure that you find it What is known and understood is real, and it is precisely this contradictory situation that makes the pursuit an unremitting effort, which is an irresistible attempt as a writer.
With her proficiency in German and Russian, Natasha worked as an interpreter for many years, and one day she met Sergei, a Russian writer. In Natasha's description, it is not clear whether she has any love for Sergei, but instead makes people realize the rotation of the gears of fate. Natasha's mother, Evgenia, married the man who was 20 years her senior because, in 1943, the man might have helped her escape from the predicament of the time, and it was the war that had made the marriage happen.
Sergei was 15 years older than Natasha, and he seemed to have discovered Natasha's talent and tried to help her achieve literary achievements (the specific process awaited the third part of "The Tears of Nastya"), Sergei died of illness a week before the wedding, and Natasha gained her inheritance and status as the widow of the writer, before which Sergei awakened Natasha's attention to Russia, making Natasha realize that the Russia she had long escaped had a very different side from her imagination, which was a contradiction, spiritual, humanistic, A world of humor and poetry.
Natasha Wodding
A year after Sergey's death, Natasha flew to Moscow to visit Nadya, a former classmate of Sergei's, while searching for the address of her father's old home recorded in her father's laundry book. The streets have long since changed, and Natasha, a Russian woman who once lived on the old streets for a few years, is now treated as a foreign tourist from the West. Even if she finds the old site and finds her relatives, in the eyes of her relatives in her hometown, her identity is also suspicious. Natasha's father was also suspicious of why he had stayed in Germany after the war as a former forced laborer under the Germans, and besides, his actions involved relatives who remained in the Soviet Union. The relatives were suspicious, refused Natasha's approach, closed the door, and as before, Natasha came to Germany, where the German locals treated her as a Ukrainian refugee.
This chaotic swing, oscillating between Russia and Germany, struggling in two incompatible worlds, is the most basic tone of Man in the Shadows.
Born in 1900 and died in 1989, his father was the same age as that century. Standing in the cemetery, looking at his corpse, Natasha saw a distant picture in front of her eyes, which she said was the key scene that determined their father-daughter relationship. When her mother drowned and her father, who was on a field tour, finally returned, Natasha rushed home to give her father, who was waiting at the door, and the father pushed her away, took the key from her hand without a word, and opened the door.
Natasha was 10 years old, and later, her father funded her to be fostered in Mrs. Drescher's house. At Mrs. Drescher's house, Natasha writes, there is a dish called an open sandwich for dinner every day. She stuffed the sandwiches into her stomach one by one, and she never had enough to eat. She couldn't take care of the strange eyes of others, she had never seen anything like it before. Earlier, her mother was still alive, but the family was always not enough to eat, Natasha could not bear the constant hunger and lack of hunger in her body, so that she did not hesitate to deceive her sister of the little food in her hands, in Mrs. Dresher's house, Natasha once again noticed, people can see at a glance where she came from, the fact that she was born in the refugee building has left a mark on her.
The Man in the Shadows
This trace makes her life in a German school also very difficult. In the monastery, she had been a laureate student, but in the new school, she wore worn-out old clothes every day, and her unusual religious beliefs made her an outlier in the eyes of the people, who took pleasure in her, gave her various nicknames, and laughed and asked her if Russian women really washed potatoes in the toilet. In Natasha," the shameful, unwelcome side of being a Russian is to be eliminated as soon as possible, and her desperate desire to be German is growing. This situation is exactly the opposite of the father's situation.
His father lived in Germany, like a stagnant mud, alcohol deprived him of his livelihood, he lost the good voice he relied on, and he indulged in drinking even more. The little refugee building became his father's island, where he could still get along with people from Eastern Europe like him. The father cursed the country he had been, and the father refused to learn German until his death, and the father would only use the German words "to" and "do not", and even his marriage to the German laundry lady could not change his stubborn thoughts, and the marriage became a joke, and all the efforts to make him understand German culture hit the wall.
My father used to be a singer, dressed in a suit, and brought home all kinds of gifts. His foreign father, whose former glory had long faded, who could not understand foreign languages, built a fragile castle around himself. His father's refusal to join German society contains his insistence on "yesterday's world", and therefore, his father's indifferent, dismissive, and hateful attitude towards Natasha is not just a father-daughter discord in ordinary families, but actually means uneasiness, exclusion and fear of foreign life and strange cultures.
The father is a tyrant in the castle, despotic, willful, extremely sensitive, angry and manic, the two daughters are subjects he can control for the time being, the younger daughter is obedient, and the eldest daughter happens to be in a rebellious adolescence, and the old lion's way of maintaining his authority is to use violence, verbal violence, sarcastical ridicule of his daughter, dressed in red shoes to become a prostitute, violent in action, strict in housework, repeatedly picky, and beaten to suppress all resistance. Everything is in a tense atmosphere, and the father may lose his temper at any time, venting his anger on his daughter at any time. In childhood and adolescence, Natasha had a strong desire for her father to die, imagining various ways to murder him. "Hatred and pity are intertwined in me— I hate my father in my childhood and youth, and I pity the lonely, sick old man I am now." From beginning to end, Natasha was unable to break free of her father. Or rather, her father was the Mariupol of which she was born.
Natasha Wodding, sister and father, with mother's tombstone behind her (illustration in The Shadow Man)
Middle-aged Natasha, already understands many things, can not ask. Looking back at the past, she also tries to reconcile with the girl's self. At that time, she longed for love in a humble, low-to-dust posture. She has a crush on the handsome Achim, willing to call for him, her love is mixed with longing desires, Achim represents a beautiful, bright life, represents the possibility that marriage can bring women to free from the original quagmire. As before, Evgenia had fantasized, and now, fatalistically, came to Natasha, so Natasha could not accept Georg's liking, George represented a dull life that could be seen at a glance, and Achim was the magnificent dream of a young girl, Natasha preferred to exile herself to become a beggar, dangerously interacting with strangers, being imprisoned and raped, and she hid alone in the basement with a hook to probe into the body and dig out the unformed fetus. Who can condemn a woman who has suffered such an encounter for crying, mourning and shouting in the night?
Why did the father, the living father, fail to become the patron of his daughter, and whenever the daughter slipped into the abyss, he still had to step on a heavy foot?
In Natasha's relationship with her father, there were warm moments. Yevgenia was arrested when she was pregnant, and he exchanged his hunger strike for his wife's release, and used his talent for singing to obtain a job given by the Americans, at that time, the family supported each other and fought, but the suffering was endless, the men began to abuse domestic violence, the women finally stepped into the river, and the children became abandoned and thrown into this cold world. "Mom, when are we going to throw in the river?" Anyone who has read "She's from Mariupol" must remember this naïve and cruel saying. In Man in the Shadows, faced with the death of an elderly neighbor, the boy asks in confusion: "Was he poisoned or shot?" "That's how they perceive the world.
And the father, the father's perception of the world, has been distorted after so many things. Not speaking German, it is the father's last insistence, and Natasha, his daughter, speaks fluent German and wants to associate with German boys, does Natasha's integration into German society make her father feel betrayed and feel the last trace of the past life between the fingers?
One of the climaxes of the book is when her angry father beats Natasha, locks her in a dark room, and crucifies doors and windows. The fuse of this incident, one is that Natasha tampered with her own report card, and the other is the due collection of the rental bill, the root cause of these two fuses is because the father does not understand German, he does not know what these Documents written in German are, and he is easily deceived by his daughter. This incident caused a rupture in the father-daughter relationship. The father is both the victim and the perpetrator, and the father's side of existence as a human being is torn apart, leaving the beastly nature to roar out of the body. It was an eruption of the father's despair about his situation.
Years later, when Natasha stood before her father's body, she was able to let go of some resentment and think as calmly as possible of those sweltering afternoons or gloomy nights when she sneaked home quietly, hiding in the sink or basement.
Years later, when Natasha stood in front of her father's body, she felt some doubts, her father's life story always had a breakpoint, behind the back of her life that she did not understand, what did her father bear?
Natasha realized that her father's cruel beatings of her might have fallen on her, as well as his past in the camp. The person who once succumbed to violence, the violent factor was also planted in his heart, and since then he has believed in violence as the norm. People who have endured humiliation, craving an advantage of their own and a desire for revenge, tend to mold themselves into an illusion of power. The questioning of the father's psychology is not only out of the daughter's desire to understand, but also a detailed and sensitive critical examination of the evolution of post-traumatic sequelae.
After the war, Natasha's family became displaced, Natasha became the "post-war generation", and the inner envelope of the simplified Chinese book was a certificate for displaced people
Natasha writes: "A daughter like me, who won over the Germans at the first opportunity, is not a traitor to him, an ally of those who abuse, beat, and mock him?" Because he does not understand a child's basic need for belonging to the environment in which he belongs, has he ever tried to subdue me, imprison me, and make me his property, just as he himself has been treated as the property of others? How can a man who has never experienced freedom, a man who lives under the bondage of two dictatorships, give his freedom to others, and to his children? For him, freedom may be just an abstract concept. He had never understood the harshness of freedom, which he had never had in his life. ”
In the past, Natasha had never dared to touch her father's silence, but now, she knew that this silence undoubtedly came from that era. In that era, speaking itself was a danger, and silence became the way people treated people and the habits of daily life. Natasha understood that she had grown up in a double silence: from the double silence of her Russian parents and the German environment. Her parents and the Germans were silent about different things, so there were two truths in her life that she didn't know at that time. The father, who was bound by this silence, adopted a high-pressure discipline for his daughter, and eventually prompted her daughter to become a writer. Natasha says his silence has always been the object of her struggle with the pen, nourishing her desire to write from the beginning.
For the father, he had one less daughter; for the world, it had one more brilliant writer. People are shackled to the chains of history because of their origins, so the story of the individual becomes a practical response to history. Deeply embedded in Natasha's memories, with questions about her father's life, and with the reinterpretation of the history of suffering in Eastern Europe, naively linked to some of the important events of the last century in a way that is not without certainty.