My Secret History

by Paul Theroux

  In those days before group tours to the Soviet Union the solitary traveler was escorted by an Intourist guide, who had a car and a driver. It was usually a large black limousine, and the driver a bad-tempered man or woman dressed like a bricklayer. The arrangement was intended to keep travelers in line—the guide a sort of jailer and nanny, of intimidating size. But I was not intimidated. I felt special. I was flattered that they thought I might be dangerous and needed to be watched. I enjoyed imagining that I was a spy. I liked having my own guide. I was very lonely.

  After four months of continuous travel I suspected I was half crazy. I had forgotten why I had set out on the trip. But it no longer mattered, because I was on my way home.

  That was why the phone call was so urgent. I needed to be reassured that home was still there, that they were waiting, that I was loved and expected. I had been sending letters into the dark.

  In Khabarovsk, Irina said—“Is unusual”—and she implied that any unusual request was impossible. She meant the phone call.

  Irina was my guide. She was from the Siberian city of Irkutsk, which she considered a cosmopolitan place. She had been posted here against her will, but she was making the best of it. She was young and very heavy, and she smelled strongly of perfume and of her hairy fox-furs. She was disappointed in me.

  She said, “Where is your overcoat? Where is your scarf? And you have only these shoes?”

  My coat was Japanese. It was too small. I had bought it for its rabbit fur collar. I had thin wool gloves and a ski cap lettered Hokkaido.

  “I thought I could buy a scarf and boots in Khabarovsk.”

  “Is not possible to buy such things here,” she said, and she laughed. That bitter laugh was the first indication I’d had that she hated being in the city where these simple necessities seemed like preposterous luxuries.

  Irina was also disappointed in me because I was not interested in her. “From Scotland,” she said of her thick woolen scarf. “Made in Italia,” she said of her gloves. I could not understand her being so label-conscious, but I got the message. I kept my Intourist vouchers in a lovely leather pouch that I had bought in Thailand.

  “Is nice,” she said the first time she saw it. “Is expensive?”

  “Frogskin,” I said. That was true. “Very cheap.”

  She sighed and looked out the window of the car. I knew I had failed her. She wanted me to woo her a little, give her a present—perhaps some perfume, or a trinket; and she would let me overpower her, if it happened to be convenient. Then she would shriek a little and demand me again. Afterwards she would put on all those clothes—the two sweaters, the boots, the furs, the Scottish scarf, the Italian gloves, and having reapplied all that makeup, off she’d go. Sank you.

  Instead, all I asked was the chance to make a phone call to London.

  She didn’t like the request. No one used telephones in the Soviet Union. They sent telegrams on thick brownish paper. The words in the message were counted twice and initialed and stamped, and reread, and examined, until it was not a message at all but simply capital letters turned into rubles.

  “Is necessary?” she said doubtfully.

  She meant: What was the point in going on a long trip, and visiting interesting places like Siberia, if your main aim in being in those places was to call home?

  “It’s urgent,” I said.

  “Is not easy to find telephone.”

  Her frown said: If all you want from me is this phone call you are wasting my time.

  But I knew this was the only way I could go home, by phoning first, and I said, “There must be lots of telephones here.”

  “Of course,” she said in that insulted tone that I associated with people in poor countries: Do you think we’re savages?

  “I meant for international calls.”

  She shrugged, using her furs, which made it a theatrical gesture. She said, “We can be able to telephone Kiev. We can be able to telephone Leningrad. We have trunk line. Trunk call.”

  Why was it only foreigners who used words like “trunk line” and “purchase” and “clad”? Was it because the words went out of date by the time they reached these distant countries?

  I said, “What about London?”

  I wanted her to say Of course with the same indignant certainty she had used before.

  She said, “First is necessary to book the telephone.”

  “Yes.”

  “And then is necessary to telephone Moscow.”

  “Yes,” I said, and waited for more. But she was thinking.

  “And then we must make inquiry.”

  “I want you to do this for me, Irina, please.”

  “Is breakfast time,” she said, “in Moscow,” and squeezed her tiny watch-face between two large dimpled fingers. “We go to museum now. Famous museum.”

  Stuffed animals with bright glass eyes, dusty birds, dinosaur bones wired together, fossils, paintings of mustachioed men, baskets and ancient tattered aboriginal mittens, and pots and weapons that made me think: Could they cook with these? Could they kill with those? The building was overheated. Everything I saw was dead, and the way the floorboards creaked made me sad.

  “Now we visit to factory.”

  “What about my phone call?”

  “Is important factory, making poolies, weenches—”

  “Irina, please.”

  She did not reply. She spoke in Russian to the driver. I had no idea we were going back to the hotel until we arrived there. Irina muttered and got out, but when I attempted to follow her the driver said something Russian to me in a scolding voice, and I sat back in the stuffy car.

  “Is booked,” Irina said, when she returned to the car. “Now we visit to factory. Then we see river. Is coming darkness soon.”

  “What do you mean ‘booked’? Booked to London?”

  “To Moscow.”

  “Will they connect me to London?”

  “I think so. I hope so.” She saw my face and smiled at me. She said gently, “Don’t worry.”

  In the late afternoon, which was dark, I was walking up the steep riverbank to the car, and it struck me that I had gone too far. I had been away too long. What was I doing, slipping on this ice in this freezing place? The dark, the cold, and the stillness were all Siberian. I should never have come here.

  Siberia seemed like death but was less final. It was more like a fatal illness, an especially anxious and even painful sort of waiting. A shallow heartbeat marked the time passing like the soft tick of a clock. It was a condition I had just begun to know: Siberia meant suspense. It was not death, but dying.

  Back at the hotel I wrote my notes—about Irina and the factory, the museum, the bank, the statue in the main square, the look of the houses, the river, and the way the old men had been fishing through holes in the ice. In these notes I was expert at leaving things out. I said nothing of the phone call. There were in my travels certain simultaneous anxieties that I did not have to write down to remember. In fact, not writing them down meant that they were always passing in my mind.

  Irina had said the call would come at eight. It didn’t—I did not expect it to be punctual in Siberia. I was surprised when the phone rang just before eight-thirty: Moscow.

  “I am calling London,” I said.

  “Number, please?”

  I said it slowly, I repeated it, and I was so preoccupied I did not hear the operator nagging me to put the phone down until she began to shout.

  The call came an hour or so later.

  “Speak louder, please!”

  I said, “Darling, can you hear me?”

  “Yes.”

  It was a faint voice, the merest vibration in a sea of sound, but it was unmistakably Jenny’s.

  “I’m in Siberia. I’ve had so much trouble trying to call you—first in Japan, and now here. I had to call Moscow first”—and then not getting any response I became self-conscious and said, “Are you sure you can hear me?”

  “Yes.”

  One-wor
d replies usually made me talkative, but this made me uneasy as well.

  “Is there anything wrong?”

  “You woke me up.”

  “I’m sorry—I didn’t know. Jenny, I’m in Siberia!”

  “It’s six o’clock in the morning.”

  It sounded distinct and complaining, but I blamed the line for distorting it.

  I said, “I miss you.”

  There was no reply to this.

  I said, “Can you still hear me?”

  “Yes.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “I was sleeping. You woke me up.”

  One can always tell from the pauses and the tone of voice when the other person wants to put the phone down. I felt this strongly, but it was so disturbing to me that I resisted it and kept talking.

  “I’m coming home soon.”

  After a pause, she said, “When?”

  “The end of the month.”

  “You said you’d be home by Christmas.”

  I started to explain.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said. But she was not letting me off. This was not sympathy or a way of excusing me. It sounded more like: You don’t matter.

  The receiver had gone cold in my hand. Another silence was loudly buzzing in my ear.

  I said, “I’m so lonely here.”

  “It was your idea. The whole trip. I didn’t want you to go.”

  “It’s been very hard—”

  But she was finishing her own thought: “It doesn’t matter now.”

  I said, “Jenny, I’m really sorry I woke you up. I’ll see you in a few weeks. I love you. Can you hear me? Darling, I love you.”

  “Jack misses you,” she said.

  Her voice was still cold. I blamed the wire, the baffled sound, the echo.

  “I must go,” she said. “I’m standing in the hall in my nightdress. I’ll catch cold—”

  “I’m in Siberia!”

  My scream frightened me, but the line had gone dead.

  “Thirty-four rubles,” Irina said the next morning at the service desk. “You make a very long telephone call.”

  I pretended to be intent on counting the money.

  “Everything is all right now,” she said, and smiled at me. She gave me the receipt.

  I said, “Yes,” but I knew something was badly wrong. I did not want to think what it was. I only knew that it was very urgent that I hurry home.

  No more stops, I thought. I took the Trans-Siberian that night straight through to Moscow—eight days of the twisty, jouncy train, and the cold and the birches. I spent Christmas Eve drunk with the kitchen manager in the dining car, and Christmas day at the window.

  I thought of a story. A murderer is so overcome with remorse at the thought of his crime and the fact that he has not been caught, that he changes his name and takes the name of his victim. His personality begins to alter, and it softens to the point where he is very meek and timid, and at last he is himself murdered.

  Why does this story happen in this macabre way? I could not answer the question, so I thought of another story, about an American in London. He stood at the window, looking out at the street—always the same opening sentence. I knew everything about this man, that he was my age, that he had been in Vietnam, that he was alone. Looking out the window, he saw a street-sweeper being bullied by a young man. What made this particularly awful was that the streetsweeper’s son witnessed his father being humiliated. The American followed the bully through south London, and picked a fight with him and killed him. The story was the price he had to pay for doing that: a long story that I saw in vivid scenes.

  I did not stop in Moscow any longer than it took to cross the city in wet snow and get a Polish visa. I boarded the next train and went straight through to the Hook of Holland, seeing everything in a blur, and reading the whole time to hold myself together.

  My book was a collection of Chekhov’s stories; I had started it in Russia, and now I was on the last story, “Lady With Lap-dog.” It was the progress of a love affair, and it appalled me with its truthfulness. I kept reading, and stopping; reading, and stopping. When I finished it I sat silently in the train, holding the paperback in my hands. I read it again. I read it four times. Each time I was drawn and stalled by the same paragraph, which began, As he was speaking, he kept thinking that he was going to meet his mistress and not a living soul knew about it. He led a double life, one for all who were interested to see … and another which went on in secret.

  It was something I understood perfectly, but it was a way in which I had ceased to live. I had one life now—I had Jenny and Jack. I had no mistress. I had been happy at home, which was why I had felt secure enough to leave for such a long time on this trip: I had a home to return to. But the description in the story was such an accurate description of how I had once felt. And by a kind of strange concatenation of circumstances, possibly quite by accident, everything that was important, interesting, essential, everything about which he was sincere and did not deceive himself, everything that made up the quintessence of his life, went on in secret …

  Not anymore, I thought. I had rid myself of my secrets; my life was simple now, and I shared it with my wife and son. But still the paragraph nagged at me. He judged others by himself, did not believe what he saw, and was always of the opinion that every man’s real and most interesting life went on in secret, under cover of night.

  Not mine; but crossing the Channel I became sad, and the sadness stayed with me. It was deeper than a mood—it was more like a physical condition. I could not bear to read the story anymore. I kept having nightmares that I was still in Siberia.

  2.

  After all that time I was very eager to see her. I also wanted to be seen. Was I the same? How did I look? I needed someone to tell me I was all right. That was one. of the anxieties of coming home—the fear of someone saying You’ve changed, you’re different, and looking closely at your face and frowning.

  I had been married to Jenny for five years, but traveling for nine—since Africa; so the travel overlapped the marriage, and circumscribed it. It was not a routine, nothing annual or planned far in advance. It was an impulsive going-away, whenever I could. It was not an escape, but a means of concentrating my mind and being alone. It helped my writing. I found it extremely peaceful to travel. And it gave me ideas. It seemed to suit Jenny, a modern woman, whose idea of freedom was a job. She knew that to me travel was air.

  Marriage made travel possible by giving me a corresponding sense of peace: I was not a searcher, looking for another home; I was a wanderer, interested in everything and always intending to return to my little family. For me, nothing was better than arriving back home. I was reassured by the solidity and the dullness, by the smells and the pictures on the wall, and by the familiar simplicities. Most of all I was reassured by the faces of the people I loved, Jenny and our son Jack.

  I arrived in the dim late afternoon at Harwich, but it was night, black and blowy, when I reached London. I met some Indians in the taxi rank at Liverpool Street Station, and we agreed to share a cab to south London. We were aliens in a strange city, trying to save money. And having been so long in India it seemed more natural for me to talk to them than to the English people waiting for a taxi.

  When we were under way one said, “We were just cooling our heels at that cab stand. The driver stopped for you, my friend.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “From Broach, in Gujarat. You are knowing Gujarat?”

  “Ghem cho. Magia ma chay.”

  “Oh, it is so incredible, Mr. Bhiku,” the man said to his silent companion. “This American is speaking this difficult tongue.”

  “I only know six words.”

  “So what? You use them superbly.”

  They complained of the cold in London, but after Siberia it did not seem cold to me—only wet and gleaming a sulphurous yellow, like the streetlights. London in winter had often seemed to me like a city underground, in a damp drip
ping cavern.

  “I’ll get out at the next corner,” I said, and gave them half of what was showing on the meter.

  “And your name is?”

  “Andre Parent.”

  “Enjoy the rest of your visit, Mr. Andre.”

  What was the point of correcting them? And it was partly true: I was temporary, an alien, just a visitor. A paying guest, in the English phrase.

  I had deliberately gotten out of the taxi in the High Street, so that I could walk the rest of the way home, completing the journey I had started almost five months before, when I had walked to the station. I liked walking; it was like writing in longhand.

  And perhaps I had another reason for walking. I didn’t want to be announced by the noise of a taxi. All London taxis had a loud and peculiar shudder. I wanted my arrival to be a surprise. I had not spoken to Jenny since that phone call in Khabarovsk two weeks before.

  I was very apprehensive as I pressed the bell. I felt like a stranger—worse, like an intruder.

  There was a human shadow on the frosted glass of the door; and the mutter, “Who is it?”

  “It’s me,” I said.

  The door opened quickly.

  “Andy!” Jenny threw her arms around me and kissed me, and all the warmth of the house and its lovely ordinary odors flowed over me through the doorway, warming my face.

  Upstairs I went into Jack’s tiny room. He was awake—he had heard the bell and the commotion. He peered at me in the dark and seemed shy. Why was he hesitating?

  “Jackie, it’s me,” I said. “I’m back.”

  “Dad,” he said—it was a gasp of relief. He raised himself up and hugged me with such strength that it seemed to me more like panic than love. And with his skinny arms around my neck I thought: I’ll never go away again.

  It was that lifeless period in London, between Christmas and New Year’s—the holiday that is like low tide, or an endless Sunday afternoon. Empty streets, gray skies. But inactivity was just what I needed after all the motion I had endured.

  Suddenly I belonged to them again. I went shopping, I began cooking dinner, and in a passionate and grateful way I performed the most humdrum chores. I washed the car, I put up shelves. I had missed Christmas, but the tree was still standing. I disposed of it and put away the decorations.