by Jocelyn Parr
Then I asked him what he needed me to do.
I need you to lie, he said. I need you to lie and say that I am dead.
For a moment I thought to myself, no problem, you’ve been dead to me for months. But then I heard myself sobbing, saying that I didn’t want him to die, that I wanted him to stay.
I can’t, he said, stepping towards me as if to hold me and then catching himself in the act, stopping, and retreating to the table. My heart ached.
We’d all heard of soldiers who, on the front during the Great War, thought it’d be better for everyone if they killed each other rather than killing foreigners, because at least that way their absence would free up some land for those who remained. And we’d heard about men who murdered their wives because they’d been nagged one too many times, and about police commissars who agreed that nothing good could come from nagging. We’d heard there was a shortage of coffins to such an extent that coffins could now be rented. Please Return was always scrawled on the top. People were dying in greater numbers every single day.
Sasha was going to be the exception. He had found a way to die without dying, and the only thing that was required of me was a small lie. I had to say he was dead. And I had to take someone else’s death away from them. He explained the finer details to me, and I said I would do it.
Then he got angry with me again and he asked me if I’d ever loved him. He said, Maybe that was our problem: either you couldn’t love me, or you couldn’t love anyone.
I got angry back. It could be that, I said, as slowly as I could, containing myself. It could be a problem with me. And then I said, cruelly, Or it could be a problem with you.
I could see from the way his lips pursed together that I had hurt him, but rather than respond, he picked up his suitcase and walked out. I hadn’t wanted to be so cruel. There was no problem with him. But I’d left it open. Even if I couldn’t figure out why anyone could not love him, he surely could.
When I pulled back the curtain to watch him walk down the street, I imagined the moment when that small piece of cloth stuck in the latch would graze a pile of snow and then how it would stay icy for as long as Sasha was outside, melting the second he went inside, and how he wouldn’t notice this change, might not notice the piece of fabric until much later, and I wanted, in that moment, to yell after him and say, Alexandr Lev Pavlovich! You are alive! You are loved! I love you!
But I didn’t.
In winter, there were always a few nights when the temperature dropped below minus twenty. There were not enough shelters to sleep all of the city’s homeless, and some of them wouldn’t have slept in a Soviet shelter even if there had been space. (Tobias, for example.) The cold was killing them. There were mornings that I walked through the park by our house afraid of every mound of snow. Afraid it was a man or a child. Too afraid to look closely to find out. Eventually the snow would melt and the body would be taken to the city morgue. If no family member appeared, the body would be cremated.
Jack knew this, Sasha knew this, and I knew it, too.
I also knew who slept in the park. I knew the shades of their blankets as they shifted and shivered beneath them. When they talked to me, I couldn’t ignore them. This was a weakness. That was why I talked to Tobias in the bar, and it was why I noticed when Tobias looked so close to death, something I had mentioned to Sasha some months before.
The best lies are mostly true. That’s how we remember them.
I saw Tobias alive one more time. I was in the grocer’s. He came in with a pile of kopeks and wanted to change them for a gold tchervonetz. His eyes were normally a bright crystal blue, but that day they were watery and pale. And he had a cough, a cough that started deep in the smallest parts of the lungs and ravaged up through every breathing part of him until he doubled over and, finally, spit.
Get out of here, said the grocer, stuffing a few paper rubles into his hand.
Several weeks passed and no Tobias.
By early February, the bright yellow of the flower that Sasha had left deepened. The petals became thick and striated, like wood. And then, overnight, the whole flower went to seed. All the petals fell off, and a pile of seeds equipped with hundreds of tiny filaments that could have been caught up in the wind or on the wing of a bird or the underbelly of a dog drifted into a sad pile of potential, settling, instead, into the dust of our desk.
On the morning that the seeds fell, I dressed in black and walked along Pirogovskaya.
I went from hospital to hospital and in each place descended to the morgue with the same question: have you seen my husband?
In each of the hospitals, I was asked to describe him.
A thin man, I said, with white hair. Seemingly homeless, but he came from somewhere, I said. With bright, crystal blue eyes.
Eventually, I found him.
When the mortician removed the white sheet from atop his body, I looked down at that man who had come to the fountain, stinking and lonely — and the room began to swim.
Yes, that is him, though I could no longer see anything through the water that had filled the room. That is Alexandr Lev Pavlovich.
The funeral would take place in the same cemetery Dimitri and I had seen from the roof of the shed on that late summer’s night. At the commission, I had read a pamphlet outlining the new procedure. It specified that the cremation ceremony called for order in the crematorium and demanded complete silence, no shouting, no smoking, no spitting on the floor. I took a taxi from the funeral commission, the urn of a strange man’s ashes on my lap.
As we drove through the city, the windows steamed up, so that I couldn’t see where we were. Though it was winter still, the morning was unseasonably mild and it was raining. The taxi was draped with boughs of fresh pine because this was his one route — from the funeral commission to the cemetery and back, all day long. From inside, I saw how they flopped with each pothole: each rut launched a synchronized spray of droplets that would land in unison on the windows and then shimmy, silver and grey, down. The driver wiped the windshield every few minutes with a rag he kept on the dash. When he took a turn too quickly, the rag slid along the dash and out of reach.
I told myself that the funeral would be for Bekhterev and for Tobias, and that for Sasha’s loved ones, it would be a way to say goodbye. My life felt more and more absurd.
I didn’t think he’d be around forever, said Dimitri, but I didn’t think he’d be gone so soon.
I didn’t know who of his friends knew what had really happened, but I did know his mother deserved this, or at least that, in theory, a mother deserved this, so I supposed she did, too.
When I’d been here last it was late summer and Dimitri and I had only seen the cemetery from the roof of the shed; now it was winter and we were walking amidst the ruins of what might once have been quite grand. Now all the largest and most stately monuments were broken. Some of the broken angels and crosses had been tidied up into little mounds of limestone. Others had sunk into the earth and were slowly taking on the rough dimensions of ancient ruins.
The group of us — Rima, Yuri, Jack, Dimitri, Sasha’s mother, and myself — followed the assigned deputy down a smaller path that had once been inlaid with stone. The path was overgrown and icy in the parts that never got sun. At the end of the pathway, the stone wall that enclosed the cemetery had been built into a columbarium. The deputy stopped at the end of the path and his assistants set down the urn.
He pulled a small book from his breast pocket and cradled it with his right hand, while his left removed a slip of paper that marked the required page. The book fell open and stayed that way comfortably, as if it had never been opened to any other page.
Today we honour the contributions made by Comrade Alexandr Lev Pavlovich to our beloved Fatherland, said the deputy.
When it was over, the deputy refolded his paper, which was now so damp it did not crinkle when he slid it into the leather-bound book. The Soviet Ceremonies, it was called.
I was the last to leave t
he grave.
The rain had turned to snow. The group walked back toward the entrance, forging a wet black path through the thin layer of white that had accumulated while we buried Tobias. I watched the easy silence they shared.
Now the cemetery was empty. Where I had seen the occasional mourner before, now I saw no one.
Quite unexpectedly, the day seemed to be coming to a close. It was still early afternoon, yet the sky hung ominously low.
The group walked past the guards and through the cemetery gates.
I was about to follow them, when I looked behind me and saw that Sasha’s mother had hung back, as though she could not cross the threshold and re-enter the ordinary day. I felt sorry for her. She had not cried, and it occurred to me that I had been unkind.
I walked back to stand beside her.
She was watching another family I hadn’t noticed.
The men wore crisp black coats and hats; the women held umbrellas. They began to sing a hymn I had heard many years before.
We watched the priest toss the earth into the grave, heard the dull thud.
Mrs. Pavlovna turned to me. I did not recognize the expression on her face, except to say that in place of the blankness I normally saw there, I saw an indisputable ugliness, something mean.
I’m very sorry for your loss, I said.
Don’t be silly, she said.
She looked me in the eye.
He’s somewhere better now, she said, raising her chin ever so slightly, from which I understood that she knew he was alive.
I looked at the lines that cross-hatched her fine features and wanted to stop thinking, because I knew I would feel something later and wanted to know what to feel immediately, which was when it would matter, rather than later, when it would be too late. I felt my eyes scrutinizing her, hating her. She was taller than me, but thin, wretchedly thin. She’d never wanted her son to love anybody but her.
She reached one hand up to her neck to close the gap in her coat, then pulled herself up straight and said in a slow, haughty way, You were never the same breed.
And then I knew what had happened. Love had had nothing to do with why she had come. She had been playing her assigned role, and she’d done it to spite me. I saw it in her eyes then and grabbed her by her skinny upper arms and shook her with all my might so that she let go of her coat and it flared open. I was hating her with every single part of me, feeling the bones in her arms beneath the wool of her coat, and blaming her for everything that was wrong in my world because anything that had gone wrong had gone wrong because of people like her. I shook and shook and shook her, causing her arms to flail helplessly at her sides and her arms were all I could see because I was looking down or at nothing at all. She let out a cry and pulled away from me, or perhaps I let go. She fell back into the mud and snow. She was a frail woman; she was defeated. I turned to see if anyone had seen me, but the snow had started to fall thicker and the moment was ours alone.
I left her lying there and walked towards the friends I had known for years, but I could not see them and they could not see me. I was shaking. I had a choice. If I veered in the wrong direction I would step onto the road, or perhaps I’d go in the opposite direction and it would be accidental. The wind gusted and I caught sight of them, huddled together. Yuri’s arm around Rima who was, by then, very pregnant. I felt I didn’t deserve them, but also that they mightn’t deserve me.
Moon! I thought. You are being sliced through and through by a swordfish!
That was the week I began to see Sasha everywhere. He was always just up ahead, slipping into a bookshop, or out of the corner of my eye, I’d see him across the street in a café, or I’d see only the back of him and I’d follow him wherever he was going, until I got a close enough look to know that I was mistaken, and then that stranger and I would part ways. In all the years that we had lived in the same city, and then in the same room, I’d never accidentally run into him. Once he was gone, it happened all the time.
Just once I got a postcard from him. After that, if he wrote again, or sent anything else, I didn’t know about it because he didn’t know where I’d gone. But I knew where he’d gone. He’d purchased the postcard in Leningrad. It was a picture of a pocket watch. He’d mailed it from the port in Rostock. I love you, he’d written. This was how to leave, he was saying. Leave on a boat. Go to Berlin.
For months afterwards, I had a recurring dream that my heart was not muscle and blood and flesh but a cave-like bone, inside which I could stand upright and barely touch the roof, and there I could yell out I and it would echo back as if I were in a magnificent outdoor amphitheatre. Or, as if I were inside an operating theatre. From all sides I was surrounded. The sharp points of infinitely long needles stabbed me. Some were so sharp that their points were invisible, and these stung the deepest parts of me. Then, I would wake up thinking of Sasha, of how he had, inside him, an ocean.
After Sasha left, I stopped sleeping well at all. The bed was too big and too cold.
When Rima came over the day after the funeral, I wanted to tell her I was too exhausted for visitors but she would have said, When have I ever been a visitor? When I opened the door, she was standing there with her face turned soft, doughy almost, with sympathy. He’s not dead! I wanted to yell at her. She held up a loaf of bread and some jam.
Don’t worry, she said, handing me the food, we don’t have to talk about anything. I was just passing by.
But Rima never just passed by, and she would have lined up for hours for the bread and been given only one loaf, which she was then giving to me.
She bent down to take off her boots, then reconsidered.
I’ll make us some tea, she said, and she headed down the hallway towards the kitchen.
I stepped into some slippers and followed her.
I really don’t need this, I said quietly, holding the bread and jam out towards her back, and then more loudly, You should really take these home to Yuri.
She looked over her shoulder, puzzling over me. Your friends want to take care of you, she said, stopping so that we were now face to face. She looked me right in the eye. Let them.
I looked away. Over her shoulder, down the hall, to the doors of other apartments where other people lived, people who had also been by, also with small gifts, and the smaller the gift, the worse I felt, because I knew they were giving as much as they possibly could.
Rima continued to the kitchen. I followed.
Look, I said, gesturing to the other food sitting on the shelf that had once belonged to Sasha and me, people have already given me too much. More than I can possibly eat.
She ignored me and lit the samovar.
Maybe feeling bad about the lie would look like mourning, I thought. Didn’t shame and mourning look much the same?
Rima sat down at the table, looking up at me.
I know you weren’t getting along, she said, but he was your husband; you would mourn him even if you hated everything about him, and you didn’t. I know you didn’t.
The samovar was warming.
I thought we didn’t need to talk about it, I said.
Sure, she said, but I could feel her hurt as if crying was something I was supposed to do — something I was supposed to do for her.
The samovar moaned a little, its warm sides creaking into heat.
I sat down at the table. Rima’s face was tight now. I’d placed a constraint on our conversation that she was going to try to respect.
I heard voices down the hall. People laughing. They would stop if they came to the kitchen and saw us, because that’s how everyone was behaving around me, as if I didn’t want to laugh anymore. But they didn’t come and the laughter continued, far away.
Rima came by a few more times. I didn’t want to lie to her and I couldn’t tell the truth, so all the ways we used to talk were ruined. I tried to ask about her life — she was so pregnant by then that she looked as if she were about to burst — but it was as if by taking away my private life from her, sh
e’d had no option but to take hers away from me.
How is the baby? I’d ask.
Good, she’d say.
On one of her last visits, I told her that I missed him, and that was true, but by then it was too late. I’d been silent for so long, and so had she, so there seemed no way back to the place we’d been when we were younger, not even a year before, when we’d been able to lie on the floor listening to the one record she had, over and over, feeling all our big and small feelings in the company of the music and each other in a kind of honesty beyond words. Now all we had left were words, and even those weren’t enough.
I hadn’t anticipated much of anything about Sasha’s departure. Hadn’t anticipated the way a lie could separate me from not only the closest people to me, like Rima, but also the barmaid at Max’s, who suddenly seemed to want to be friends, as though, in some way, she thought the grief she felt about his loss must resemble mine. Hadn’t anticipated that the worst part about the lie wouldn’t be the questions about what had happened but about how I might be feeling and whether or not I needed something, anything. The kindness of others made something inside me feel rotten, as if I was actually decaying.
I certainly hadn’t anticipated the housing inspector.
As soon as I opened the door, I knew who she was and I knew I’d have to move. That, or I’d have to ask for help. It had taken nearly three months for them to realize I was living alone in an apartment slated for two.
She wore heavy work pants and a heavy work shirt, both grey. A pack of cigarettes in one of the shirt pockets, pens and loose paper in the other. Her hair cropped short and sprouting as if she’d spent most of the morning hanging upside down and this was the first of her right-side-up visits. Something bat-like about her, I suppose. The strain on her eyes, mouth, and face when she spoke, as if she were about to bite or scream.
She’d been sent over from the housing department to measure the room. She smelled so sour. Your husband died? she said, looking at her notes.