by David Park
There is a barrage of questions about the motivation behind the poem, and whether Osip chooses to answer vaguely or honestly his responses evoke a tirade of scorn and invective couched in familiar language. So he calls the poem ‘a document’ and rages about its counter-revolutionary criminality that is ‘without precedent’. It’s as if he wants to beat them into the dust with the righteousness of his words and he pauses only to take the opportunity to sneer at ‘spineless intellectuals’. She catches Osip’s eye and they know that in this time to be called an intellectual is to be despised and understand that there is something in this volley of accusation and reproach that seeks to sweep away all their pathetic ideas and books, even poetry itself, and smash them into splinters with the greater triumph of historical inevitability. He is in full flow now and has reached a part of his script where he turns to her and fires a series of rhetorical questions.
‘What should a true Soviet citizen have done in the face of such outrageous and unprecedented criminality?’
‘How could any Soviet citizen sit quietly and without protest in the presence of such vile slanders?’
She knows that he requires and expects no answers so she stares over his shoulder at the little sliver of light and wonders if it will be her last view of the outside world. They say the executions take place at night. She wonders if they blindfold those about to die somewhere in the hidden bowels of this place. A tiny bird moves across the sky. What must it be like to be free? What must it be like to live in freedom without the everlasting press of fear?
It’s fear he’s talking about now, teasing Osip by telling him that it can be a good stimulus for poetry. She glances again at the blood-stained bandages on her husband’s wrists and when the interrogator momentarily runs out of threats and condemnations she asks about them and is told her husband has committed another criminal offence by smuggling forbidden items into his cell. With a razor blade hidden in his shoes he has tried to cut his wrists. This is a crime that clearly angers him almost as much as the poem itself. He must have hidden the blade there sometime before his arrest but never told her. If he had listened to her they could have done this thing together, spent their final precious moments as close as they have been in life. How they would have chosen to do it is unclear to her but it had to be better than this botched attempt in some darkened cell and far from the comfort of love. Then as the interrogator stands and momentarily turns his back on them she remembers what she saw in the eyes of the prisoner in the corridor and tells herself that she has no right to judge.
In the absence of their captor’s gaze they glance at each other and the smile that passes between them contains more than words might say and she silently tells him to be strong, that she’s all right. He tells her with his eyes that he loves her and she is glad that nothing that has happened has been able to weaken the certainty of that.
When their interrogator turns she realises that this is the moment when they will learn their fate and she senses by looking at his awkward, slouching stance and momentary hesitation that the script is about to deviate in some way from what he is used to. She cannot believe that the uncertain pause arises from any instinctive reluctance to announce their fate or any secret longing for mercy. Then he stands more formally and straightens his shoulders, dredges up again his authoritarian formality of voice. She is not to be charged and then he speaks almost affectionately about a labour camp on the White Sea Canal and with a lingering trace of regret tells them however that it is not to be Osip’s destination. He hesitates again before seeking to impress on them that as a result of some magnanimous generosity of mercy ‘from the highest level’ the appropriate sentence has been commuted to exile in Cherdyn. For the first time she hears the words ‘isolate but preserve’ – it is the directive that will allow them the possibility of life. She will be allowed to accompany him if she wishes and then there is a sense of embarrassment evident in his face, almost as if he has been thwarted in his obligation to pursue revolutionary justice, and she is ushered quickly from the room. As she leaves she brushes her husband’s shoulder lightly with her hand. It is the first time they have touched in weeks. She sees the final sneer of the interrogator’s contempt and then she is in the corridor again and hurrying down the staircase.
What she remembers now as she drains the cup and presses her head back against the wall is how big the sky seemed when she stepped outside those doors, unfurling above her, stretching into some future that for the moment at least seemed released from darker certainties. There was no time yet to consider consequences or where their banishment might lead them because nothing seemed more important than that they would be allowed to be together and when that was true what did it matter if they lived in Moscow or somewhere else? As she hurried back to the apartment to start making the necessary preparations she tried to tell herself that it was no bad thing. They would disappear into some provincial backwater, far away from the whispering and the listeners, lead a quiet existence and slowly fade from the memory of the state. In her first flush of optimism she painted a picture of a small town in some idyllic pastoral setting where they would not be prisoners of their disease, where their minds would be free to exist without the suffocating weight of fear crushing the life out of them.
So as the voices next door start up again as if the lull was merely derived from exhaustion, rather than reconciliation, she momentarily thinks of knocking the wall and shouting that they should be grateful for what they have, however imperfect, that the fragile ties of love are easily sundered in the days in which they live. She remembers again that brush of her hand on his shoulder in a room in the Lubyanka. Had that room ever been witness to such a touch in all its history? She wonders if somehow the fleeting moment is stored still in its memory, a tiny exorcism of fear. It is his touch she misses most now and as an attempt to compensate she hugs herself briefly but it brings nothing except the self-pity she has always sought to avoid. Now there is a child crying next door in a high-pitched accompaniment to her parents’ shouts. All the warmth has gone out of the cup. On the other side of the wall everything falls suddenly silent.
4
1952
So what is the true nature of love and how could it ever hope to endure in the world in which they found themselves? There was no great ceremony in their marriage, all of that dismissed as a bourgeois decadence from the past. Later a certificate on cheap paper. Cheap as the two blue rings they bought for a kopeck each near the Mikhailov monastery even though it was still a secret and so he carried his in a pocket while she wore hers hidden on a neck chain. He was older than her and they had no extended courtship with all the flowers and rituals that go with wooing. It simply happened and felt right that it had happened, so she gave herself to it despite the warnings of her friends who seemed to think that it would never work.
He lost his ring. She broke hers within a year. When she’s tempted into sentimentality she thinks she would have liked him to have had it with him at the end but tells herself that what they carried of each other was more real and more lasting than any ring. Yet early on it sometimes felt as if her friends would be proved right and she couldn’t be sure that what they had embarked on would endure. She was feisty, independent and found it difficult to submit in the ways he expected. He for all his liberalism and free-spirit thinking was surprisingly traditional in what he conceived as the role of a wife. So he wanted her to be at home and at hand when she felt herself young and wanting to experience all the social possibilities that existed, the cafés and the gossip, the music and the dancing. Often they fought like cat and dog and more than once she thought they wouldn’t see the next year out.
She stands at the window at the end of the corridor where it meets the stairs. Outside the summer has almost slipped away once more and the clusters of trees that encircle the dormitories have nearly shed their leaves. A few hang on, too stubborn or too weary to give themselves to the fall. She shivers against the realisation that winter is coming and tries again to warm
herself with memories of love. There is the sound of someone crying below. It’s one of the students in the teacher training college where she has found a temporary post teaching English. She hesitates on the landing uncertain about what she should do. It is always dangerous to get involved in the personal affairs of others when it can never be gauged where such involvement will lead. And the college itself is a hotbed of intrigue where the staff spend their spare time writing anonymous letters denouncing each other and sitting in committees adjudicating on various issues of discipline – everything from student dress and sexual morality to ideological purity. And of course in the classes themselves there are informers, ever vigilant for deviance from the official line even if it involves how to teach grammar. So it is imperative that she continues to keep a low profile, doesn’t stir the waters. The young woman’s face is hidden from her, veiled by the thick fall of her dark hair, and the preoccupation with her sorrows leaves her unaware of another’s presence. She is about to turn away, quietly climb the stairs, when she hears the girl sob deeply, her attempts to stifle the sound spilling into stuttering gasps.
She tells herself that it is a sentimental foolishness, but instead of returning to her room she slowly descends. The girl sitting on the step shuffles closer to the wall as if to let her pass and turns her face away. Able to see now that she isn’t a student in one of her classes for a second she thinks that this might perhaps absolve her of whatever responsibility she instinctively feels. The reason she stops and sits on the step beside her is not just the memory of those who chose to help them despite the dangers, it’s because she knows that to walk on will admit victory to those who have made people suspicious of each other, who despite all their talk about the collective have driven them into separate, silent entities. So each time she finds a connection with another, however fleeting or superficial, it feels like a small, silent act of resistance.
She says nothing to the young woman at first but simply sits on the step beside her. Perhaps that will be enough and already in her presence the sobbing has faded into almost silence. The student wipes her eyes with the heel of her hand but won’t look at her.
‘What is your name?’ she asks.
‘Frida,’ she answers in what is barely more than a whisper.
‘So what is it that makes you so upset, Frida?’
But the girl only shakes her head leaving her to consider the possibilities. An affair of the heart? Disappointing marks in her examinations? Some petty fall-out amongst friends? These are the usual student dramas. She looks for clues in the student’s appearance and demeanour but nothing yields itself. And if truth be told she doesn’t think she can muster much sympathy for a heart broken by juvenile love. She pats the girl silently on her shoulder and stands up.
‘Can I trust you?’ the girl asks, suddenly looking up at her.
‘No you can’t,’ she says immediately. ‘Because you must never trust anyone you don’t know. And if there are important things that you need to say you must find someone you trust with your life.’
‘There is no one.’
‘Then you must keep everything to yourself until you find that person.’
‘I think I can trust you,’ she says.
‘But you don’t know anything about me other than I am a teacher.’
A door slams shut somewhere and they both fall into a momentary silence. She is already regretting having spoken to the girl; it was an indulgence that she can’t afford. Since finding work in the college she has kept her head down, adopted a persona that offers no glimpse of the person she is. So she has offered no opinions, bitten her tongue in the presence of idiots and time-servers, bowed her head to the inane ramblings of the Director. She needs to survive, to feed and clothe herself so she can endure in the hope that she will preserve the poems beyond the existing world. This young girl’s problems might be nothing that a bit of common sense won’t fix but there is the possibility that if she becomes privy to them then they will draw her into a spotlight she has sought so hard to avoid.
‘I know your husband was arrested.’
The words are frozen motionless, so suddenly real that she can almost touch their coldness, but she lets her face register nothing and does not answer.
‘It’s what they say,’ the girl adds, as if trying to justify what she has said.
‘You shouldn’t listen to gossip,’ she tells her but when she turns to leave, she feels a hand clutch her arm.
‘Please. I meant no harm. I understand.’
She wants to slap her, to tell her that she can’t understand, but instead she pauses because now she needs to know what if anything is the consequence of this knowledge. The young woman takes her pause as an indication that she is willing to listen but instead of speaking points to the little store that is in the corner of the stairwell. She opens the door with a clearly practised stealth and beckons her in. She hesitates. Nothing feels right any more but she enters. There are bundles of shovels for clearing the winter snow, their blades rusted but white-speckled; brooms and buckets and an untidy pile of heaped logs lolling at an angle. Open pipework lattices the walls and some of them are lagged with old sacking. The girl closes the door behind them, holding it open just long enough to put her eye to the narrowed seam of outer light. A small high window allows a shadowy smear of daylight to define the cluttered basement space. It suddenly feels like a game that she doesn’t want to be playing, a game where the forfeit for losing is not yet fully known.
‘We come here sometimes,’ she says as she sits on a broken remnant of a classroom desk, its wood stained with blots of black ink and carved with initials.
She doesn’t want to know this, she doesn’t want to know who it is that comes or what they do. Doesn’t like the way this student feels able to include her in her secrets. All her focus is now on how she will extricate herself from this situation. And there is a sudden fear that somehow her own fate is in danger of being bound to the emotionally fragile state of this young woman whose cheekbones still glitter with the traces of her tears.
‘Tell me now,’ she says to the young woman and she inflects her voice deliberately with a teacher’s impatience.
She sees the girl’s hesitation, her stalling for time in the way she pushes her hand through the untidiness of her hair. So she nods at her, signalling her to start. Leaves fritter and whisper against the thick glass of the window then blow elsewhere. Already she knows that what she is about to be told is of consequence but she can find little in her that cares about the girl, thinking only now of how it will affect herself and what danger it might bring. The girl hesitates again and then the words tumble out and she cries again when she has finished.
So she has a boyfriend whom she loves dearly and who treats her better than anyone has ever done. He is the son of someone important in the local Party. She has met both his parents and they have also treated her well. Her own parents have perished bravely in the war. Except they haven’t. Instead, at the start of collectivisation, her father was exiled as a kulak to Arkhangelsk and her mother had fled with her to distant relations who had conspired to keep their origins hidden. As a teenager Frida has simply invented a new identity for herself and thrown herself into it with all the vigour she could muster, joining the Pioneers and then gaining admission to the Komsomol. But now she has received an anonymous letter that threatens her with exposure if she doesn’t break off her relationship. She thinks it’s from someone jealous of her newfound love, even someone who sees him as quite a catch and wants him for herself. She doesn’t know how this person has found out about her background – she has never told anyone, not a single soul.
The type of story she’s just listened to is not unknown to her in its essential form. All over the country people reinvent themselves constantly. Some earnestly try to erase all the details of their previous life, seek especially to banish any present trace of affiliations to those who have proved themselves enemies of the people. Some will blissfully contradict what they publicly ear
lier declared was their passionate belief; disown even their wives or husbands. The individual concept of self is now built on shifting sands, destined to move in parallel with wherever prevailing winds might blow. So what now must she say to this young woman who faces the loss of her love? She looks up at the small window and remembers the one above the interrogator’s head, the glimpse it briefly afforded of far-off sky.
But already she knows she has no answer to give. There are spent matches on the floor. The room has been used as a smoking den.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says, then turns to go.
‘What must I do?’ the young woman demands as she stands and holds out a hand towards her in a gesture of entreaty.
‘Do you love him? Truly love him?’
‘With all my heart.’
‘Then there’s nothing can be done except to hope that he loves you equally,’ she says and she shakes her head to try and stop the futility of further questions. ‘I hope he does. And if he doesn’t then you’re better off without him.’
And then she opens the door and climbs the stairs and walks quickly along the corridor to the small room that has been provided for her in return for the duties she carries out in supervising the dormitories. She has no more thoughts for the young woman except that if it comes to her drowning she hopes she does so without pulling anyone else under with her. Her position has been too hard won and she is not yet ready to search out another bolthole.
She kicks off her shoes and curls herself under the blanket that she persists with for the little warmth it provides despite its coarseness that scratches the skin. She makes herself small in the bed trying to generate as much heat as she can muster before slowly stretching her limbs into the colder spaces. She tries to remember what it is like to sleep with someone close whose warmth and words could shut out the outer world. Her hand moves to her face and she remembers how when she’d return after they’d been apart, even for a few short hours, he’d touch it, tracing its contours as if he was restoring her to his memory.