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One of the most graceful sights that I have seen is my mother cross-country skiing.
She had been doing it since she was a toddler, every winter, and she tells of her once trying it on the grass in June, to the laughter of her grandmother and great aunts. So in university, she was on the women's ski team, and held the rank of Master of the Sport in skiing, an athletic ranking difficult to achieve, meaning that she was one of the top skiers in the entire Moscow region.
She still speaks with respect of her university ski coach. Friedrich Valentinovich Malberg was his name, a strange combination of foreign first and last names with Russian patronym. He went by the name Fred. He knew how to get the best results possible out of women skiers (he never coached men). My mother tells of how people jealous of him tried to get his trainees to give evidence that Fred was having inappropriate liaisons with his skiers; she laughed in their faces when asked such a question. Fred could not have done that, she says to this day.
When he took the team to a training camp outside Moscow, Fred told them on the first day in the cafeteria, "Look around you. See all those people eating alone? Tomorrow, everyone will be in couples. I don't want you girls like that, going off forming attachments just because you're on a vacation away from home. We stick together as a team!"
When my mother told me of this phenomenon, I nodded. In my one experience with a bunch of near-strangers tossed together in a foreign place, that summer camp in Spain when I was thirteen, relationships formed with alarming speed; it seemed that everyone except me had found their soulmate within those fourteen days and wept to part from them on the last day. And how many of those connections endured? Well, now that there is the Internet and Facebook, probably more than there used to be, but that is not the point; the point is that those conditions are ideal for whirlwind romances, and Fred knew that.
Another time, the team was sent for summer training on the Baltic shore. Fred told them all to bring roller skates (in those days and in that place, nordic skiers did not have the specialized roller skis like they do now). All of the girls ignored him and took their swimsuits instead. My mother took her swimsuit, but she tells that she was the only one who brought roller skates. So while the rest of the team was at the beach, she and another girl who had the same shoe size as her ended up going through hours of technique training --- with one skate each! The other girl cursed her mightily.
She tells that when, as is traditional, the young women would sing, while travelling and in the evenings, Fred always insisted they would sing one song in particular. She supposes it is a Russian translation of a French song, so here I present the English translation of the Russian translation of a French song:
Foreign cities come again
And over them again the rains fall gray.
I hid my face in a crowd
From you, I wished to get away.
Where to seek, and how to find
The love one did not keep and now can't own?
Like this somber grayish rain
I wander homeless and alone.
I'll always
Remember
The love that
You had for me, so true
I only
See now
How I have loved and still love you.
Gray snow falls over La Manche
The waves have hidden hope's white sail away.
Late last nights I had a dream
That I've come back to old Marseilles.
Again my way to you I make
But all my love entreaties are in vain.
I try and cannot awake
And so must part with you again.
I'll always
Remember
The love that
You had for me, so true
I only
See now
How I have loved and still love you.
Sometimes my mother sings different lyrics to the same tune:
I want to forgive you, I cry,
To let the sun back into the sky.
I want to forgive you, I cry,
For now, and forever more.
I do not love, you replied,
And this was heard by the flowers outside.
I'll forgive, but what if they
Cannot forgive what went before?
And memory
Is sacred
Like the reflections of a leaping flame
Forgiveness
Forgiveness
Ask now not of me nor in my name.
But I think she said that it was the song about old Marseilles that Fred insisted on --- and she says she saw tears in his eyes, sometimes, when the girls would sing it. What, in Fred's past, made him love that song, we will never know. A Google search of his name gives only one mention, and only in a list of many other ski coaches. He told my mother that, given three years, he'll get her on the Olympic team; she had the potential. And given that she shot so well, winning rifle competitions since she was twelve, biathlon would have been ideal --- but she never had the chance to combine her two skills in competition. A few days short of turning 21, she got married, and things became very different. They generally are, in the family I was born in eight years later.
She had been doing it since she was a toddler, every winter, and she tells of her once trying it on the grass in June, to the laughter of her grandmother and great aunts. So in university, she was on the women's ski team, and held the rank of Master of the Sport in skiing, an athletic ranking difficult to achieve, meaning that she was one of the top skiers in the entire Moscow region.
She still speaks with respect of her university ski coach. Friedrich Valentinovich Malberg was his name, a strange combination of foreign first and last names with Russian patronym. He went by the name Fred. He knew how to get the best results possible out of women skiers (he never coached men). My mother tells of how people jealous of him tried to get his trainees to give evidence that Fred was having inappropriate liaisons with his skiers; she laughed in their faces when asked such a question. Fred could not have done that, she says to this day.
When he took the team to a training camp outside Moscow, Fred told them on the first day in the cafeteria, "Look around you. See all those people eating alone? Tomorrow, everyone will be in couples. I don't want you girls like that, going off forming attachments just because you're on a vacation away from home. We stick together as a team!"
When my mother told me of this phenomenon, I nodded. In my one experience with a bunch of near-strangers tossed together in a foreign place, that summer camp in Spain when I was thirteen, relationships formed with alarming speed; it seemed that everyone except me had found their soulmate within those fourteen days and wept to part from them on the last day. And how many of those connections endured? Well, now that there is the Internet and Facebook, probably more than there used to be, but that is not the point; the point is that those conditions are ideal for whirlwind romances, and Fred knew that.
Another time, the team was sent for summer training on the Baltic shore. Fred told them all to bring roller skates (in those days and in that place, nordic skiers did not have the specialized roller skis like they do now). All of the girls ignored him and took their swimsuits instead. My mother took her swimsuit, but she tells that she was the only one who brought roller skates. So while the rest of the team was at the beach, she and another girl who had the same shoe size as her ended up going through hours of technique training --- with one skate each! The other girl cursed her mightily.
She tells that when, as is traditional, the young women would sing, while travelling and in the evenings, Fred always insisted they would sing one song in particular. She supposes it is a Russian translation of a French song, so here I present the English translation of the Russian translation of a French song:
Foreign cities come again
And over them again the rains fall gray.
I hid my face in a crowd
From you, I wished to get away.
Where to seek, and how to find
The love one did not keep and now can't own?
Like this somber grayish rain
I wander homeless and alone.
I'll always
Remember
The love that
You had for me, so true
I only
See now
How I have loved and still love you.
Gray snow falls over La Manche
The waves have hidden hope's white sail away.
Late last nights I had a dream
That I've come back to old Marseilles.
Again my way to you I make
But all my love entreaties are in vain.
I try and cannot awake
And so must part with you again.
I'll always
Remember
The love that
You had for me, so true
I only
See now
How I have loved and still love you.
Sometimes my mother sings different lyrics to the same tune:
I want to forgive you, I cry,
To let the sun back into the sky.
I want to forgive you, I cry,
For now, and forever more.
I do not love, you replied,
And this was heard by the flowers outside.
I'll forgive, but what if they
Cannot forgive what went before?
And memory
Is sacred
Like the reflections of a leaping flame
Forgiveness
Forgiveness
Ask now not of me nor in my name.
But I think she said that it was the song about old Marseilles that Fred insisted on --- and she says she saw tears in his eyes, sometimes, when the girls would sing it. What, in Fred's past, made him love that song, we will never know. A Google search of his name gives only one mention, and only in a list of many other ski coaches. He told my mother that, given three years, he'll get her on the Olympic team; she had the potential. And given that she shot so well, winning rifle competitions since she was twelve, biathlon would have been ideal --- but she never had the chance to combine her two skills in competition. A few days short of turning 21, she got married, and things became very different. They generally are, in the family I was born in eight years later.
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