Last Saturday I told you I would not learn the Udmurt language.

You didn’t teach it to me and I don’t blame you.

Now there are three languages in which we can speak, but Udmurt is not among them.

The Udmurt language is still a rural one. We rarely went to your village because of conflicts in the family.

People in the city laughed at the Udmurt accent. When you and your class came to a city, they shouted “Votyaki!” at you.

Maybe you wanted to protect me from this.

Also I don’t look like an Udmurt at all. You often told me I looked like my father as if it was a talisman.

***

One day I heard a podcast about migrants in America. They said migrants often didn’t teach their children their own language in order to improve their chances in the new society. They didn’t talk about the past, didn’t share knowledge about their culture. However, the pain of the loss was transmitted wordlessly.

Is it possible to be a migrant in your own country?

Is it possible to be a migrant when your home is seventy kilometers away?

***

It seems to me, you wanted to run away from your past, to become someone else. You don't even have the Udmurt accent, even though Udmurt is your first language.

I am so far from the Udmurt culture that alienation is now my home.

***

I didn’t have a grandmother. She died when I was little.

Grandmother Vera taught Zhenya the Udmurt language when he came to the village. In the city, the language was not passed down.

I don’t want to study the Udmurt language because it is used only in families. To study Udmurt out of a family is like studying the family lexicon with strangers.

***

In the past, grandmother Vera often said: I speak poorly Russian. For the Russian language, it is an inversion, for the Udmurt – the usual syntax. Why that they says, I don't know. Sometimes I say this myself, copying the word order unconsciously.

***

Your father jokingly called you kyshno.^[1] A teacher, when she had explained a subject, asked jokingly: Valamon?^[2] Someone greeted someone jokingly: Zechbures.^[3]

I have questions that I will not turn into accusations.

People collect words like pebbles.

All I want to say: I didn’t have an opportunity to hear these words in real life, that is why the Udmurt language seems unnatural to me.

***

A memory of you speaking Udmurt.

A morning in the village. I wake up, but you are not beside me anymore. In the village we slept in one bed, because so many relatives came there. I felt joy from this as if I was again a little girl and could be closer to you.

I open a door and hear you talk Udmurt to your sisters in the kitchen, you all laugh. I enter the kitchen. You all have clothes over your heads so that your hair would not get into cooking. All surfaces in the kitchen are already covered with baking sheets filled with perepeches^[4] hot baked pies.

I am sure this memory is a mixture of several memories, but I like it as such. I like to see you happy there.

***

Close to her death, grandmother Vera didn’t speak Russian anymore. When we saw her the last time, her daughter, Zenya’s mum, translated from Udmurt for us. Grandmother said: mon tone yaratïs’ko.^[5]

I heard these words for the first time in the context in which they should be used, not as a joke.

***

More than a year ago, Zhenya and I went to the Ludorvay museum. We wandered around a field and looked at the Udmurt houses brought there from different villages.

I found a house that looked like yours. Somehow it struck me. This house belonged to someone some time before it was transported to the museum. But in the museum it became a model with which I could compare my memories. It verified my own experience.

In that yard, that was no longer real, I opened the gate and breathed in the thick smell of grass on the field. I thought, that from now on, I could decide myself what kind of relationship I will have with these places; they are not defined by your family history anymore – the words you told to each other.

***

All the time I keep trying to put a full stop to this topic, but it doesn’t work.

With every day, this text grows more, and I can’t control it.