The Poets' Wives

by David Park

  3

  1947

  A couple are rowing in the adjoining apartment, the thinness of the walls and the passionate anger of their voices playing out their marital failures to an audience who have no option but to listen. She shrugs her shoulders and lights the kerosene stove in the corridor. Reconstruction after the war promises them gas but she has little faith in promises any more. She measures out the leaves in the careful, miserly way that is ingrained in her and heats a pan of water. Then sitting on a little stool she rests her back against the shiver of wall that separates her from the warring pair. She warms her fingers on the flame and silently tells the couple on the other side of the wall that they should be grateful they have each other to fight with.

  Despite knowing it no longer has any useful purpose and is a waste of precious energy she continues to ponder who betrayed them, even though she understands that its only result is to visit the guilt of one on all those in the apartment who heard him read the poem – some of them counted as dearest friends. All now tainted with suspicion. Perhaps if she had the guilty to hate it would be a comfort. She tries to remember those assembled, to compose the exact scene with the frozen clarity of a photograph, tries to match a face with an expression that might reveal the Judas as they listened to Osip declaiming those words that history will say have changed their lives. Sometimes she too likes to believe the poem did change their lives because it makes everything simpler, but if she’s honest with herself she knows his fate was already sealed – it was there in the whisperings that grew too loud to be safely ignored, the veiled condemnation of previous works, the way he found himself pushed to the very margins.

  There were always spies, of course, just as there still are. In every apartment block, in every single tributary of human engagement, a secret empire of listeners relay to their masters whatever it is they want to hear. But the night he delivered the poem about Stalin they both believed only the true and the faithful were his listeners. Would it have made any difference if he had known otherwise? Part of her suspects that this was the path he had chosen for himself and that it seemed to him that he had no other road to take. He never spoke to her about it, before or after. But when he uttered those words about ‘the murderer and peasant-slayer’ she sensed that he had freed himself in some way, so that the feeling he was left with was not fear of the consequences but in that moment a powerful release. In the poem’s uncharacteristic and unsubtle directness everything that he had seen in the previous years and everything he felt about the inviolability of poetry’s commitment to truth seemed to be released.

  Part of her is proud of it but some part of her angry that he allowed their future to be determined by his own needs. As she sits alone in the tiny space that serves as a communal kitchen and heats tea on the stove she remembers the visit he had made to the Crimea, the journey through the Ukraine and the Kuban. She pushes her back against the wall as if its thin solidity might prevent her own images returning. But it’s as if the voices next door pierce the seal of memory to reveal once more the spectres of starving peasants, moving like ghosts through a familiar landscape suddenly ripped from them and rendered remote and hostile. The swollen stomachs, the spindle-limbed children with hollowed sockets for eyes, almost too exhausted to hold out their begging hands. Heaped piles of corpses like broken, tangled bird nests fallen at the sides of roads waiting to be shovelled into the back of a cart. The black halos of buzzing flies. People clutching on to existence by eating grass and roots, the bark of trees.

  ‘If you’d seen the half of what I’ve seen,’ the man’s voice next door asserts, ‘you wouldn’t go on like this.’

  He’s come back from the war but theirs has been no happy reunion. They have made her an unwilling participant in their lives. She tries to shut her ears to their clamour. But it wasn’t just about what Osip had seen those years ago – it was what he saw in the future and how he felt it was poetry’s responsibility always to tell the truth. He used to joke that this was a country that had the highest respect for poetry because there was no other place where more people were killed for it.

  She makes the tea and wishes she had a little sugar or even a lemon. The shouting momentarily dies down. Part of her is glad and another part hopes that it won’t result later in equally noisy lovemaking. The night in Moscow when they first came for him it was about one in the morning. She knew right away – they all knew. That moment and the moments after it constantly play out in her mind, the memory unwilling to be dimmed. There was the suddenness and the insistent loudness of the knock – just the way it had always sounded in her imagination – and yet when she opened the door for a second the absence of uniforms almost lulled her into a moment of hope. But it lasted no longer than the time it took for them to brush past her into the apartment, to demand their papers and then search them for weapons. Did they count a poem a weapon?

  The couple in the next room are talking loudly now. Sometimes just before sleep, or in the early-morning drift into consciousness, when she hears a voice she imagines Osip has returned to her. He comes in and acts as if he’s been out for a walk or running an errand and he chats to her about the weather as he takes off his coat and hangs it behind the door. But then when she goes to speak he vanishes. She calls silently out to him but her words return to her unanswered.

  There were five of them – three police and two witnesses. They seemed to fill all the available space in the apartment and she sees for the first time the uniforms under the overcoats. Osip is given the warrant to read and he seems calm and then they start the search. They are looking for a copy of the poem even though it does not exist in written form, or at least recent work that can prove him guilty under Article 58 of the Criminal Code by which all political prisoners are charged. She almost admires their practised professionalism as they work as a team, searching out every potential hiding place while their leader concentrates on the contents of the chest where they store the manuscripts, carefully setting the papers that he will take away with him on a chair while throwing others on the floor so she has to sit and watch them trampled and footprinted. It goes on for hours almost to daybreak. The youngest of the searchers lightly rebukes her for smoking so much. Does he think this reveals his compassionate concern for her wellbeing? And of course there is the inevitable joking response when they see her preparing things for him to take with him. ‘Why so much? He’ll be back. A few questions, that’s all.’ They must learn it in their training so that it’s like a script they perform again and again because the words flow easily and naturally from their mouths. Akhmatova who had been visiting had insisted that Osip eat something and she gave him a hard-boiled egg which he salted and ate sitting at the kitchen table. Eventually when they have finished their search and they have taken him away it is not the scattered papers she remembers or the sound of the door closing so finally behind them, but the little pile of egg shell and its white speckle of salt.

  Afterwards with Akhmatova she sits waiting for the new day to begin so that they can do all the things that are needed. Some of the manuscripts are removed in shopping baskets, a few taken by trusted relatives who have come to help, and then there is the scurrying around the city, speaking to Bukharin and anyone she thinks whose influence could be brought to bear, and she is grateful when Pasternak comes and asks what might be done. But there is only the distant rattle of typewriters and a heavy-layered silence in the corridors in which she sits waiting for hour on hour and an unalterable sense seeping out from behind the shut doors that they have been cast off. How could she have thought that she would find anything different? The crime was committed against the Leader himself and soon it became obvious that no one would dare lend their voice to her and the one who made a phone call to try to ascertain the situation soon put the phone down with an ashen face, the warning printed on it.

  Akhmatova tells her not to touch the discarded manuscripts that still litter the apartment floor and as she predicts they come back but this time there’s only one of t
hem – the senior man – and it’s soon apparent that he’s been sent for another rummage through their papers. They mustn’t be satisfied with the evidence gathered in the first search. She can’t decide if this is good or bad but what does it matter because she can remember the proud boast of a former official of the Cheka they had encountered in Yalta in 1928 – ‘Give us a man, and we’ll make a case.’ If they so choose they can find a man guilty of whatever crime they wish so why waste this time in a search for their evidence? Perhaps because Osip and what still exists of his reputation represent a challenge and so requires more attention to detail than might normally be expected of them. But the second search reveals nothing more useful than the first. And so there is no more for her to do but wait.

  She misses the taste of sugar in her tea but it’s good and strong and warms her even now as the voices behind the wall suddenly flare up again. He’s calling her lazy and a slut, accusing her of unfaithfulness in the years when he was fighting for Mother Russia. Her denials are angry, pressing themselves deep in the silence that suddenly smoulders in the hallways and the other rooms. Perhaps the whole block is listening and she imagines that for some at least this will count as entertainment in the dull listlessness of their days. She has seen them both several times on the stairs but they have barely acknowledged each other. It’s always easier like this and no one ever wants to be drawn into the complications of someone else’s life. So despite all the intimacies they have unwillingly shared on a daily basis they acted like strangers. Separated by the war years she thinks they should be grateful for their reunion, the restoration of the love they must surely have known.

  What did her own separation feel like? She knows the shock of it made it sharper and more persistent than the dull pain she carries permanently with her now. And it was made worse too in all her imaginings of what might be happening to him and the constant nightmare that he might simply have vanished from her for ever. Never to see him again, for their earthly relationship to be terminated by a knock on a door – it didn’t seem possible. So it felt in those first few days that she was sleepwalking, shut out from the normal realities and preoccupations of life. It was Akhmatova who made her eat and she is grateful every day for the strength that loyal friendship has given her.

  After the initial flurry of their activity had faded into a despairing silence the phone call came. Osip’s interrogator was summoning her to the Lubyanka and almost immediately she was issued with a pass. The name of the prison alone still makes her shiver. How many unshared nightmares about this place have rendered the city’s citizens’ sleep broken and fearful? At first rumours of what went on inside its high walls had been common currency but even these had died away, as if even mentioning the name might expose the speaker to its terror. The prison had assumed a reality and power beyond its physical existence so that it festered in the mind as an idea, divorced from location or boundaries. It lurked in the consciousness like some permanent inescapable anxiety that shadowed the very pavements they walked each day. She wanted to see her husband, to know what was happening to him, but she was frightened too about what might become of her in this place. She told herself that if they wanted her arrested they would have come already but she knew people who had entered through the prison gates and were never seen again. The voice on the phone had brooked no discussion, answered no questions, and left her only with a shocked silence.

  When she stands in front of the building she is forced into a new awareness of the weakness of the flesh in the face of the state’s walls of stone, in the unchallenged power of those who now rule over them. Her mouth is dry and she has to draw on all her reserves of strength and pride not to buckle and slink away. She shows her pass, undergoes a perfunctory search by a guard who seems disinterested as if counting the hours until his shift ends. A clerk administers a few details and gives her instructions. It is not what she expected. Her childish imaginings of dungeons and chains bear no connection to the offices, corridors, the large staircase she has been told to climb. It feels like another bureaucracy and if what is being processed is not paper but human beings then there are no outward signs of the work being undertaken. As she starts to mount the stairs she wonders if all those years they have been deceived, encouraged to create their own terror like children cautioned into good behaviour by tales of ogres. There are no screams rending the air but only the sharp clack of heels on wooden floors and doors being opened and in the seconds before they close again the clatter of typewriters escapes. A man in civilian clothes clutching a folder of paper approaches her and she thinks of showing her pass and asking if she is headed in the right direction but he looks right through her. She turns the corner in search of the office to which she has been directed when she sees them coming. A tall man holding his trousers to stop them falling and on either side two men she assumes are his interrogators. His head is shaven but blue-pitted, a swollen moon, and his skin wears the pallor of the confined. His cheekbones are dark-smudged and look as if they’re trying to press themselves free from the bruised stretch of his skin. She sees them before they see her and immediately they bundle the man through the nearest door.

  But it is enough. Enough to stay with her the rest of her life as one of the many things she wants to forget but cannot. Now as she leans against the wall and cups her tea the moment returns to her again and not even the heat she nurses between both hands can warm it away. It is the look in the man’s eyes she can never forget. She has never seen fear this close before. Never fully understood what it looks like in the human face. It’s in the eyes – their frantic, skittering movement, the way the pupils slowly dilate into the darkness of infinite space, the way he stares at her in silent appeal so desperate that he wants to believe even someone as helpless as her might be able to save him.

  She has seen terrible things before. During the Civil War in Kiev she has seen bodies of those hostages shot by the Bolsheviks just before they gave up the city to the Whites, their own Red Army dead and wounded heaped on carts as they left with shouts that they would be back and the terrible fate of some women denounced as Cheka at the hands of the mob after their departure. All this shocked and sickened her but in this corridor with its numbered rooms and its walls painted a shade of green she has never seen in nature, the wild terror of the man’s eyes touches her to the quick. If this is what they can do to you then what hope remains? She knows they take away the means of self-harm – the belt of your trousers and the laces of your shoes – and all the windows are bolted or barred. The moment and the means of your departure from this world are jealously guarded. They will not let you usurp their power. She has to pause for a second and although she doesn’t want to touch the wall with its slime-coloured paint she needs to find support and so she reaches out her hand and steadies herself trying to breathe deeply. Somewhere far off there is the sound of a door slamming and muffled voices. She has reached the appointed room. Part of her wants to turn quietly and return the way she came. But she likes to tell herself even now that it was never courage she lacked and so she knocks on the door with an attempted show of resolution and waits.

  He sits behind a desk bare except for a neat sheaf of papers squared precisely in its middle and does not look up when she enters. She soon realises that it’s just the first of his practised mannerisms and when she does so it drains away a little of her fear. He is probably in his early thirties, his face plumped with the benefits of his rank but bagged and blue-blotched below his eyes, the product no doubt of his frequent night work. His thick and oiled hair suggests he has spent significant time in its grooming. There is a faint scar on his left temple that looks as if it’s been there since some childhood accident. It helps her a little to imagine him as a child once. Finally he acknowledges her and points to a seat but still doesn’t speak, continuing to read through his papers as if he can’t be interrupted. The room has two chairs besides his own and little else. There are two internal doors and she wonders why a room that size requires them both. But already sh
e understands that in this building there are worlds within each other and she tries not to think of the one that is hidden to her. The walls are painted the same colour as the corridor and the small window behind his head affords only a square of colourless sky but she guesses that it is what those who are brought here from the cells must turn their eyes towards.

  The interrogator is so obviously conscious of his performance that it leads him into artificialities of speech and theatrical gestures. And when he addresses her his words are delivered in what is meant to be a weighty and authoritarian tone, talking to her as if she is no more than a foolish wayward child, or a piece of dust that must be shaken from his clothing. It pleases her that she is able to despise him and part of her suspects that the anger he purports to display towards her husband’s ‘hideous crime’ has to be stoked from a weary fire. Some years later she learns, but without pleasure, that their interrogator, this man who sat in judgement on them, was shot in 1938. The sow always eats her farrow. Over and over.

  But now it is Osip he threatens with shooting. Osip and all his accomplices. Her husband has stumbled into the room with his guards, the front of his trousers bunched in his fist. She looks at him and sees immediately that he has travelled far from himself. And just as she is shocked by his appearance, he is shocked to see her – he is staring at the coat she’s wearing – and then she realises that they have told him she too was arrested and held in the prison. He sits beside her but they do not dare touch and she notices for the first time that his wrists are bandaged before all their attention is demanded by their questioner whose job it soon transpires has been rendered largely meaningless because Osip has openly confessed to writing the poem about Stalin – there is a text of it in the interrogator’s hand and he holds it away from him while reading it as if he’s in danger of being contaminated by its obscene content.