My Little Ship, Forever at Sea

By Polina Kouzminova

Polina was brought to New Zealand as a 10-year-old by her parents, from the cold Sheremetyevo airport to the heat and exotic green vegetation of the Land of the Long White Cloud. Her life has been lived in a dual form ever since – all this time she continued to hold onto the expansive wild landscapes of Russia, while marvelling at the tug of the Piha coast and the bright clean sunlight. Polina explores this duality as a hybrid identity of an immigrant, paying attention to both her own story while also exploring those of Auckland’s Russian community, her immediate family and friends. She shows that starting life from a zero, accumulating possessions and learning a new language are not the most vital things for an immigrant, but rather in her experience it is a deeper connection with the surrounding environment which opens a true and genuine conversation with the spirit of the land. This spirit has hummed a tune for Polina’s integration into the new society, under the auspices of her parents and other figures, whom she observed and had known, to now present her story about one of today’s most vital topics – immigration and identity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Nov 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9781528970549

Polina Kouzminova

Polina Kouzminova is a Russian-born, New Zealand-raised poet and writer. She released a poetry collection An Echo Where You Lie (Mākaro Press, 2016), which was followed by a number of stage performances. She completed her Master’s degree in language teaching and had taught in France, and then travelled around New York, Australia, Hong Kong and Russia’s smaller cities. My Little Ship, Forever at Sea is Polina’s first full-length novel, which was born from her travel experiences and life growing up as an immigrant.

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About the Author

Polina Kouzminova is a Russian-born, New Zealand-raised poet and writer. She released a poetry collection An Echo Where You Lie (Mākaro Press, 2016), which was followed by a number of stage performances. She completed her Master’s degree in language teaching and had taught in France, and then travelled around New York, Australia, Hong Kong and Russia’s smaller cities. My Little Ship, Forever at Sea is Polina’s first full-length novel, which was born from her travel experiences and life growing up as an immigrant.

Dedication

for my family

Copyright Information ©

Polina Kouzminova 2021

The right of Polina Kouzminova to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

All of the events in this memoir are true to the best of author’s memory. The views expressed in this memoir are solely those of the author.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781528940962 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781528970549 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published 2021

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd®

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Canary Wharf

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E14 5AA

Acknowledgement

Белеет парус одинокий, в тумане моря голубом. Что ищет он в стране далёкой? Что кинул он в краю родном?

Михаил Лермонтов (1814–1841)

A white sail drifts through mist, along a blue sea. What is it seeking in a distant country? What did it abandon back home?

Mikhail Lermontov (1814–1841)

Ascent of Water

and Sunlight

Standing a few metres higher from the ground on the edge of a cliff, I was looking down over the ocean with a bird’s eye view. And the ocean was being eaten by the sun, as the red-orange sunset was expanding over it; or perhaps the waves themselves were tugging at the sun, so that water could swallow it. It was a tug of war kind of a game. The waves were turbulent, tumultuous and never at peace. But such is the supreme reign of nature – the play of waters, as if an ongoing rumble in God’s stomach. I always felt that God who lives in New Zealand is wild. He is close to nature. He likes enclaves, dark caves, long winding trails into green bush. He likes thunder and lightning, and the tropical storms, which showcase his mighty anger.

Piha is a wild beach in New Zealand, on the coast of Auckland. It signifies the most treasured memory that I have of my early days in New Zealand. The long one-hour drive in our Russian friends’ car along the motorway and then up the winding Piha Road, introduces you to a blue mirror lying flat, that reflects the blues of the sky above.

Piha was a favourite summer pastime, for me and my family. An exhilarating thrill, as the waters swallowed me whole and tumbled my boogie board away from me, as my dad laughed wholeheartedly for the first time in his life without a second thought, and my mum wore a bikini from a second-hand store and was the most beautiful lady on the beach (all the men on the beach turned heads and whistled). Me and my sister share many photos – us together in panamas, waving at the camera, those childish faces as if little actresses with the most spectacular blue backdrop we could hardly imagine, while living in a 17-storey apartment in our historical and grotesque Moscow.

The Russian couple who drove us to the ocean in their cheap car, had separated, while living in Auckland. My father had a name for him, the man, the name of some insect богомол (pronounced as /bogomol/), which means mantis in English. No, he did not look scrawny, but rather was tall, big and bald. He used to lock himself away in his room and sit alone with his pet – the mantis in a jar, while his girlfriend banged on the door and screamed for him to come out. I guess they had their troubles.

The woman had short hair and whenever she visited my mother at our flat, she would sit in our kitchen, smoke all the time and talk about her misfortunes and hard life. Apparently, a few years after separating – this couple got back together and moved back to Moscow. We never kept in touch, even though we shared stories about our past lives back home in Russia and jokes about the state of our English, which we learnt on-the-go. We shared food. I think my mum even has a photo of us with the woman. She had muscly, round, very tanned short legs. My sister stands next to her and makes a grimace. In truth, I never liked her, the lady, because she thought my sister was cuter than me. At Piha, she made a comment that my sister’s white panama was very fashionable. It made me resentful, so I grabbed the panama off my sister’s head, while the woman laughed. I don’t remember anything that happened afterwards.

There were a lot of parties and gatherings with a lot of people, in the first few years of living in New Zealand. I remember a lot of good-looking Russian women sitting by the bonfire, gossiping and chatting, while their husbands stood around the bonfire and looked after the BBQed sausages, kebabs and the roasting potatoes. They drank wine and the women drank dark tea (without milk, as it is commonly done in Russia). As a usual occurrence, conversations revolved around reasons for immigrating, reminiscing about life back home, politics, and employment.

My mother liked to exchange cooking and shopping tips with her friends. Her favourite shop has always been the Salvation Army and the one-off op-shops she would find, while getting about town. It all began – the idea of buying cheap clothes, when a Hungarian woman gave her a big black rubbish bag stuffed with underwear (of very large sizes), dresses, shorts, and blouses. It was a kind of a hand-me-down gesture. The Hungarian lady was friends with our landlords. They, the people we paid rent money to, were an aged pair who considered us as almost refugees without much, and I suppose the gesture was an act of kindness. Since then, even after finding employment and being able to shop at normal or even the more expensive outlets, my mother still favours second-hand stores. She would always find a stool or some lamp shade, which she would renovate by cleaning and painting it. I guess she likes to give things a second life, through this kind of ‘search and renovate’ technique. I think it is just a skill she picked up as a novice immigrant: how to be good with money and how to do away with having little by being thrift.

I guess in a way, it was the beginning of the Russian community back in the 1990s, as New Zealand continued to open its doors – an entry pathway for people seeking a better chance at life. I still remember the many faces I met in those years – the people who married New Zealanders, the ones who came here to join their families – various babushkas, the Russian grandmothers (or, the old ladies), with their collections of black and white photographs, and the children of Russian families who were born in New Zealand. Now that I am here, many years since those initial novice years of exploring our new space and reconstructing our identities (feelings and attitudes towards life), I no longer keep in touch with some of these people, my initial former friends and acquaintances. We have lost contact, and I have leaned towards a private way of life.

For me, it is a life in New Zealand, where nature comes first. People living here like to fish and venture around by the beach. They like to take photographs of the ombre in the evening sky, while crossing Auckland harbour bridge. It is the lightness of life without such a deep concentration on material things. It is a life, that is free from survival. A life that can help you transcend pain and make you much more thoughtful and quieter, in the process.

This is probably what I was missing about New Zealand, when I spent a year teaching English in France, and when I visited New York and drifted towards the Statue of Liberty on a ferry under the grey clouds and the rain, which began to drizzle on me.

France felt like a head rush. I began to cry just as the plane descended at Charles de Gaulle Airport. The bright-green grassy airfield and the new atmosphere above, suggested, I was finally in a new place, completely alien to Wellington. I was overwhelmed again, as I caught the TGV to Paris and walked all over the Parisian streets, missing to look at objects around me due to tears covering my eyesight. I am not very religious, but it was something about seeing Jesus on the Cross and being inside Notre Dame that started the tears, or perhaps it was the parcel I received from my grandparents, via the Russian lady who handed it to me under the Eiffel Tower. Maybe both. I tumbled a lot, being taken by the sights – the architecture, grandiose residential buildings, the French people around me carrying baguettes, the stylish cafés where writers like Camus sat and thought. France had stolen something from me, and changed the beating in my chest, while I was walking along its boulevards. There was so much of this country, which had opened up to me finally, after I spent many years studying French at high school and the university, studying the cathedral architecture, the writers, the movies…

America was intriguing, but I felt overwhelmed with its politics and security mechanisms. I suppose it is a city of adventure, and I did return back to Wellington with an expanded sense of looking at the world. I stood at the top of the Empire Building and took many skyscraper gridline photos; I visited the Disney store at the Times Square with its sparkly lights, and walked through the luminous green Central Park. It is incredibly beautiful, and in that kind of an elevated almost fantasy-dreamy state, I sat in many cafés drinking coffee and eating bagels. I thought a lot about life and how I was changing as a person through my travel experiences.

After these travels, for one reason or another, a certain feeling had settled deep inside me and had become a part of my being. I started to think more about nature, and how it unifies us. It is almost like I have always felt it. Perhaps a certain small piece in our DNA, in all of us, lies dormant and at some stage makes itself known. My thoughts resonated around nature – and I realised, that we, humans, must have something in our biology, which indicates that we have an ancient historical tie to nature as it was at the beginning. Nature, not houses, not manmade objects, but something that cannot be touched, only felt. If we let it and the conditions are right, that piece can awaken and enlighten us in a certain way.

It is strange, how over time, I grew accustomed to the way of the land here on these two main islands in New Zealand. It is a feeling of mental immersion and a sense of being closer to some spiritual home, where you are at one with the sky and the anonymous God who seems kinder, than anywhere else. Over the years, I grew aware of my belongings and the fact that I do not need as much as I thought I did. Before the big torrents that merge into grey when the weather changes to darker shades, I tend to demystify myself – no longer a woman, no longer a name, no longer an age, not even a body – but something larger than all of this. Like a flight of a dark bird, that instant so intense, that all you can think about is one word: life! A pure life, free from artificial attachments to things.

The wings make pressure against the wind and the open air fills the lungs – the flight over the ocean is something mystical and I feel that watching it, I am that bird – albeit not completely at one with the strong forces of nature, but trying to understand it. And that in itself, that process of trying to understand, is what makes that metaphorical flight possible.

It can be a gradual process to regain that balance with nature, if you are an older immigrant, I think. But back then, I was a child, and the width of space of the ocean was the most magnificent thing I had ever seen in those first few days in New Zealand, and it will probably remain that way forever. I loved the shimmering purple dancing lights of the Eiffel Tower at night, as the laser ray shimmered, – the magnificent span of its endless radius. The beautiful New York streets with alleyways and iridescent night lights of Times Square are a sight to behold. And while all this is breath-taking, the ocean is arcane. Where did it come from, exactly? What dwells within its deep waters? Will the rush of the waves ever stop, gradually becoming still waters? I don’t think so; Piha will always lie there, spread out by New Zealand. Black sands will shift mystically in the early hours of the morning and will just as numinously swirl as knots and webs in the air, and into night time. Such is the rhythm, since the beginning of time.

I did not find that kind of meditation among the conversations in my early days in New Zealand. Sitting with adults at the table, eating котлеты (/kotleti/ – meatball burgers), пельмени (/pelmeni/ – Russian dumplings), and a variety of salads with a lot of mayonnaise, I remember they mostly talked about memories of Russia they had left behind, and whom they left behind – their aging parents, aunts and uncles, houses and jobs. To me, this kind of atmosphere, especially when Russian pop music of the 1990s was turned on, made me feel in touch with my homeland – it was a certain warm, inclusive feeling, something I felt very close to, and something I did not need to ponder about for too long and understand, like I did, in comparison, with my new life in New Zealand.

Overall, I had no problems tuning myself into Aotearoa. The bright white-yellow light, almost as if the first rays that would have shined upon planet Earth when it first appeared out of nothing, greeted me when I walked out of the airplane through customs and stood by the entrance of the Auckland airport. I do not remember exactly where it came from; somewhere from above, it rushed through the tall glass windows to brighten my eyes. Now, I associate it with religious paintings of the New Zealand artist Colin McCahon; there’s a certain spiritual initiation I sense from that light – something pure, clean and untouched by the world’s turbulent dark history. That light resonated around the green bush we drove through. I questioned my father – when will we finally see the houses? I was so used to the familiar landscape of Moscow’s state housing blocks, that seeing none felt foreign and strange. I was slightly alarmed. And that feeling of seeing, encountering and doing new things every day was new and exciting to me, but also made me perturbed somehow, as I felt more sensitive than usual to my new surroundings. It was probably something that as a child I felt from adults around me – my parents and their friends, who had a lot of fears starting a new life from zero.

A lot of people move from Australia to New Zealand and vice versa. There’s a two-way movement between Britain and New Zealand, too. Even Americans come to live on this two, main island country, along with the French and Scottish immigrants. But it is something about the Russians leaving their giant terrain and all that history of Tsars, Lenin, Dostoyevsky, and Tchaikovsky, the endless snowflakes outside one’s self-tiled kitchen, the merciless winter, and the overwhelming politics that bind us so closely to our land and culture. So, when we leave – it is such a big rip, causing a rupture in the sky, as the plane hovers above planet Earth, carrying, as was in our case, a four-member family and two suitcases into an unknown place we heard about from friends, saw on TV cheese and milk commercials, and read about in tourist pamphlets.

Last Snow

We left Moscow city late in the morning. Our friend helped us with the car ride. He had a dog and she was with him, too. It was a little animal who ran around the apartment, as if aware of our departure. I remember our friend was still finishing оладушки (/oladushki/ – hot-cakes) with jam, which my mother prepared in the kitchen that morning. It is strange to remember this detail now. Why would she go to all that trouble making them, when we had to leave quickly that morning to catch our flight? Just as easily, she could have made tea and cooked some eggs. The hot-cakes take a lot of time, and the first few always burn as the pan heats up. Perhaps, the reality of us leaving Russia did not yet settle in her, or she was very lenient to go. It was my father’s idea in the first place and I remember my mother telling me later how she wanted to rip apart our visas and passports that morning, just so that we would have no way of leaving.

We had a nice apartment in Russia. We had a beautiful curtain, ironically made out of little blue shells, hanging in