A Question of Return

by Robert Carr

  INTERVIEWER

  In 1978, you met Solzhenitsyn. What did you talk about?

  LAUKHIN

  What do you say to somebody like Solzhenitsyn? Soldier, zek, cancer survivor, math teacher, writer, polemicist, memoirist, Nobel-prize winner, bricklayer, phonetician, acoustician, husband and father, sage, reader of the nature and the essence of the Russian soul, in touch with God. Is there anything you can say that would be of the slightest interest to him?

  It wasn’t an easy visit, not at all. Not for me, or, I think, for him. He wanted to know what was going on back home, but how interested he really was I’m not certain. I had left the Soviet Union a month earlier and I got the impression he already had fresher reports. He said he was very much looking forward to reading my father’s journal, that the journal was invaluable, and urged me to get it out as quickly as I could. He also said that when he was in the hospital ill with cancer he read one of my father’s novels and that he had enjoyed it. He couldn’t remember the title, though, or what it was about. He apologized for not being familiar with my poetry. He said he had very little time for reading.

  INTERVIEWER

  It sounds as if you don’t have pleasant memories of the visit.

  LAUKHIN

  Interesting memories, but I can’t say pleasant. It’s not easy to have conversations with famous wise men. They are amenable to monologues, maybe, but not to conversations.

  INTERVIEWER

  You’ve been here, in North America, for seven years yet Britishisms pepper your speech—rang him, porky, tight, rather. Why is this?

  LAUKHIN

  The teachers I had in school taught us British English. I was not aware of it at the time, of course. And I had an English girlfriend in the early seventies. For a couple of years—oh, a bit more than that. She was a student in Moscow. Somehow, the English I learned from her is imprinted in my brain.

  INTERVIEWER

  Weren’t you married at the time? Well, of course you were, since you were still married when you left.

  LAUKHIN

  I was married.

  INTERVIEWER

  What happened to the English girlfriend?

  LAUKHIN

  She finished her studies and left. She got married not long after she returned to England.

  INTERVIEWER

  Have you seen her since you left the Soviet Union?

  LAUKHIN

  That’s not what the interview is about.

  INTERVIEWER

  Another dead end. Besides Philip Korn’s initial one, Fedya Malgunov did a translation of Bolshevo Days into English a few years later. Which one do you prefer?

  LAUKHIN

  Depends on my mood. Probably Philip’s.

  1 The cover of the June 1971 issue has a caricature of the younger and much thinner poet on the cover, his moustache, cowboy hat and boots, and loaded holster farcically oversized. The caption is “Artyom Laukhin Conquers the West.” (E.B-W)

  Monday, 6 April 1953

  Before she left with Larissa in the morning Varya asked if Stalin’s death would affect us. She leaned on me as I was sitting and doing some revisions, and I glanced up at her, unsure of what she meant. She looked pale and tired because she had slept poorly overnight, tossing and sighing, and long before daybreak she switched on her night-lamp and read.

  “Yes, of course,” I said, “it would affect everybody.”

  “I mean … he liked your books.”

  That was what had kept her awake. She’d gone to see her sister the day before, and God only knew what she heard there.

  “Did your sister offer counsel?”

  She ignored the sarcasm. “She doesn’t think Berya will be the one. He has revisionist ideas, very dangerous.”

  That was Sasha Cornilov’s assessment, not her sister’s. “Was your nephew there?”

  “He left shortly after I arrived.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Not much, kept to himself. He didn’t seem particularly worried, but my sister is. She said you should be worried too.”

  Stalin had long ago lost interest in Oleg Vinograd. That was the gist of a friendly but convoluted message Fadeyev passed on to me when he became chair of the Writers’ Union the second time, in forty-eight. He called me into his office and, after idle palaver and a few drinks, he adroitly mentioned the vozhd and his love of literature. It might have been more than a few drinks because, after I told him how Stalin had sent back to me several galley proofs marked by his own hand, I added, “I must have reached perfection in my craft under his guidance, because he hasn’t done it for quite a while now.” Foolish aside, of course, but Fadeyev was drunk too and, anyway, he wasn’t the type to report asinine remarks. He laughed and, shaking his finger at me, said Stalin had not read any of my books for years. I asked, stupidly, how he knew. He said, “I know.” I couldn’t refrain from gasping. I didn’t understand—then or later—why he found it opportune to let me know that my novels were not on Stalin’s night table anymore. After he refilled my glass Fadeyev assured me the vozhd had been simply too busy, and there was nothing I should worry about. His bloodshot eyes tried to smile as he added, “Anyway, Pavel Nokolyevich, your novels are selling very well without any propping, and making up for many other doing rather poorly. We’re not capitalists, but must be mindful of our rubles.”

  I had not told Varya then about Fadeyev’s message, and I certainly didn’t tell her now. Why worry her? Instead, I said what I repeated to myself often, that I was a good writer—in a minor genre, true, but a good writer none the less—that I had a large number of readers, and that my readers were utterly unaware that Stalin had been fond of my novels.

  “You won’t do anything foolish, would you?” Varya said.

  “Foolish?”

  She left the room without answering.

  I had seen Fadeyev two days earlier, on Povarskaya Street, briefly, as I was coming in and he was leaving, and he didn’t look well at all, pale and puffy. At lunch, later, I heard he’d been drinking more than ever. Another favourite of the now dead puppeteer, but, unlike me, he had lasted much longer and on much higher heights.

  Was I right to dismiss Varya’s worries? Could we go the Fredkin way if the new vozhd, whoever he turned up to be eventually, happened to like the work of a budding artist in need of a better place to live? It might take a while for the new leader to emerge and become secure, and he may not be as ruthless as Stalin was, but did we really know? Did anybody know anything?

  Zinaida Nikolayevna came down to the door of our apartment just as I was about to leave. She was holding a small suitcase.

  “I saw Varya as she went out,” she said to me, “and she mentioned you’d be visiting my husband today. Don’t know why you’d go, Pavel Nikolayevich, since he’s coming home in a few days, but if you do, take this to him, please. ” She pushed the suitcase towards me. “You’ll save me a trip. Boots. A few other things too, but it’s boots he’s asking for, so he can go out for a walk now that the weather has turned.”

  Looking around her, she seemed ready to come in, but changed her mind and whispered, “Have you seen it in the newspaper?”

  “I saw it.”

  “What do you think?”

  “Would be a relief for Boris Leonidovich.”

  She looked at me with a smirk. “Well, only as it is for all of us. He’s not a doctor, your friend Boris, and doesn’t think he’s a Jew either, with all the Saviour and Transfiguration and other unpublishable Christian piss he busies himself with.”

  Was she reading her husband verses, or she heard that somewhere? Was it a comment on the novel?

  Zinaida seemed in a hurry and left. An odd woman, now probably rushing to gossip with her cronies, and yet supportive of Boris Leonidovich in her grumpy, abrupt, limited way.

  The train was slow and crowded, and it was only after Mytishchi that I found an empty seat. After pointing out at the window and the beautiful day, the young man in the next seat wanted to know where I was hea
ding to. He was well dressed, smiling, and smelling of vodka. I said Bolshevo, and he said he knew Bolshevo very well because his father had spent a few years there. When I asked if he’d lived there, he laughed and said, “In a way. Free of rent. He was an engineer, and got lucky when the war came. I’m speaking too much. It’s a good thing I’m off here, Chateau Podlipki.” He laughed again, stood up, and, after lighting a cigarette, went down the corridor.

  Pasternak shook his head when he heard Zinaida wasn’t coming, but was very glad of the boots. Opening the suitcase, he chuckled. “Ha, it’s not just boots, it’s a coat and pants and what not. I think Zinaida has used you as a mule. I’m leaving a day after tomorrow, and she wasn’t keen on carrying all these. Was she having a game of cards?”

  He wasn’t interested in an answer, as he quickly became irritated. “These are not the right boots. I wear them working in the garden, in Peredelkino. Ha, she cleaned and shined them. What for?”

  I asked him how he was feeling, and he calmed down. The last time I saw him was in January, on Lavrushinsky Lane, after being discharged from the Botkin hospital, and he had gained weight since, although not much. Pale, his white hair whiter and carefully combed, somewhat unsure on his feet as he stood up from a chair to greet me. He had a brown, worn out housecoat over his pajama, clearly not something recently bought in one of the stores of our workers’ paradise. He was keen to put on his boots and go out for a walk. “We should take advantage of the nice day, Pavel Nikolayevich,” he said. He had socks on already, and as he steered his feet into the boots Zinaida had sent, he said he was feeling fine, a bit frail, true, but delighted to go home, to Peredelkino, to his novel. Yes, the doctors had recommended rest, but he could not afford it. “The novel awaits me. It seems foolish to say such things, Pavel Nikolayevich, but in a way I’m grateful for what happened to me. God had wished this on me for a purpose, I have no doubt about it. Things are clearer now.”

  “Clearer?”

  “I felt death’s heavy breathing on my face, Pavel Nikolayevich, and I’m no longer afraid of her. I asked for a furlough, a few more years to finish my novel, and my request was granted.” Tapping his forehead, he added, “I know now I’ll have the strength and the time to finish it. What would be the point of this respite otherwise?”

  He bent to lace his boots, but gave up with a groan and looked at me. “Just tie them up, for me Pavel Nikolayevich, never mind all the holes. It will be easier to get them off later.”

  I helped him put his coat on, and we went out. We found an empty bench after a couple of tours during which Boris Leonidovich received many greetings with dignified nods of head. It wasn’t unseasonably warm, but the sun was lumen-strong, and the sky of a baby-crayon blue. As we sat down, I thought Bolshevo was an odd place to have a sanatorium, and I told Boris Leonidovich that I didn’t expect Bolshevo to be so drab.

  He nodded. “Drab, yes. I had the same impression when I came here just before the war. I saw Tsvetayeva in Bolshevo, in thirty-nine, not long after she arrived. The dacha they were confined to was a bit off, though, not exactly in the town.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  Boris Leonidovich waved his hand. “Another time. It’s a longer story and I don’t have the fortitude.”

  The patients were out in droves, walking and talking and gesticulating. Well, they had plenty to talk about. Two older men passed by our bench, one of them holding the day’s Pravda under his arm. I warmed my face in the sun, eyes closed, and thanked the gods for my good health. We were quiet for a long time, or so I thought, when I heard him say, “I should go there, Pavel Nikolaevich, pay my respect.”

  He’d been talking before, no doubt, and I missed it. “Go where?”

  “Yelabuga, of course.”

  It was unexpected, but I knew what he was on about—jolted by one of his occasional guilt trips into a trip to the faraway Urals.

  He confirmed what I thought. “I lie in bed at night, unable to sleep because of the noises around or God only knows what, and, as I’m in Bolshevo, I often think of her. I need this pilgrimage, Pavel Nikolaevich, a way to reach some peace. Would you come with me?”

  That was unexpected. “Why me?”

  He didn’t answer for a long time. At last he said, “You were generous with her. Generous and brave, yes, brave too, I know the pressure you were under, Kolya Klyuchev told me at the time. I think your wife complained to him—she’s never liked me since. I felt so ashamed afterward.”

  Kolya Klyuchev. Poor Kolya, long gone, dead in the war, blown into a million pieces by an artillery shell that fell on his operating tent. Untangling the body parts of the patient, the surgeon, and the two nurses helping him proved impossible afterward.

  “What would you do there?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Kneel at her tomb and pray.”

  “They wouldn’t like it,” I said after a while.

  “Times are changing. The amnesty, and now this thing in Pravda about the made-up ‘doctors’ plot’. You know who’d been arrested in this plot? Vovsi, the cardiologist who looked after me at Botkin in the fall.”

  “On Povarskaya I’ve heard people say you faked your illness.”

  “Fake a heart attack?”

  I nodded. “You saw the nooks tightening around Jewish necks, and called in sick.”

  “But the doctors—“

  “That’s the thing, Boris Leonidovich—Jewish doctors. Vovsi is a Jew, isn’t he? The Jewish doctors look after their own, including false diagnostics, while carrying on with their terrible deeds.”

  He swore—the first time I heard him use profanity—and then laughed softly. “Yevgeny kept me informed. I didn’t want to know, but my son thought otherwise. He and Zinaida wanted me to be prepared, in case they came to me. Imagine it, Pavel Nikolyevich, force the Jews to sign an appeal to Stalin begging to be spared for the medical crimes their brethren committed, asking to be resettled far away in the East. Ha. The inquisition would have been proud of such an idea.”

  “Oistrakh signed it, and Grossman and Marshak. Landau, the physicist, too.”

  He shook his head.

  “Would you have signed it?”

  “The Lord saved me.” And, because I looked puzzled, he added, “Everything has a reason, Pavel Nikolayevich, don’t you see? This heart attack saved me from groveling. Somehow they didn’t come to me with the appeal. I might have been in the emergency ward at that time, and they probably thought that was the limit. It also put me past the vozhd’s demise and all that mess.”

  When I said goodbye to him in front of the main building, he said, “Well, maybe I’ll wait for Ariadna Efron’s return.”

  I realized he was back on his planned journey to Yelabuga. “Sure, she’ll want to see her mother’s grave,” I said.

  “She’ll be released soon, won’t she?” he asked.

  “One can only hope. I don’t know how long her sentence is, but, as a woman …”

  “Yes, the amnesty said the women would be released first. Especially those with light sentences.”

  He was probably thinking of Ivinskaya too, and, vaguely malicious, I asked, “Why not Zinaida Nikolayevna? Why don’t you travel with her?”

  He shrugged, but wasn’t prepared to elaborate. Instead, he went back to his boots. “I may need a new pair of boots. This one …” Then, confirming what I just thought, he whispered, “Olga Vsevolodovna would be out soon too, wouldn’t she, Pavel Nikolayevich?”

  6

  With a sigh, he picked up the draft Erika Belov-Wang had sent him. That’s all he needed now, busy as he was. It had been Bart’s insistence that got him into this. In her brief handwritten note, she warned him she needed his corrections “earlier than ASAP!!!” in order to meet the magazine’s deadline.

  She had left a few things out of the transcript. Insane Erika Belov-Wang might have inserted a paragraph or two about frolicking with the poet. Something like, “Just before lunch we had sex on the carpet behind Art Laukhin’s desk. I had a bruise
on the small of my back the next day and I’m sure his elbows and knees hurt for a while. In case the reader is wondering how this came about, I initiated it—although he did seem to stare at my legs and crotch throughout the interview—hoping to bring the reader more intimate information about the poet. And if you’re interested in Art Laukhin’s sexual flair or preferences …” It was probably her editor who chucked it, after he called her into his office and asked, pointing at the paragraph, “What’s this?”

  “It completes the portrait.”

  “Erika!”

  Over lunch Laukhin had asked her, “Why did you do that?”

  “Why did I do what?”

  “You know—fuck me.”

  “It takes two.”

  “You’re not answering me.”

  “To know you better. To gain insight and ask better questions.”

  “Do you always do this?”

  “You mean, fuck my subjects?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not always. And never women.”

  An odd name, Erika Belov-Wang, its parts incongruous. He should have asked her how she’d ended up with it. He meant to, at lunch, but after what transpired between them just before, he forgot. She went on with the interview later as if nothing had happened. She was right, nothing of consequence had happened (or not yet; perhaps whoever opened the door while they were at it, was simply waiting for the right moment to tell all), but he’d felt awkward afterward. It wasn’t the generational difference, it was simply his age. Twenty years earlier, even ten, he’d not have used the word insane to describe Erika Belov-Wang. He would have said daring, full of life, curious, sparkling, at worst barmy—the words he’d once used to rationalize his delight in Joan Geraldine. The Joan Geraldine of ready laughter and mischief.

  Joan Geraldine Huxley—now with a different last name—had come from London to study Russian language and literature in Moscow. She was fond of introducing herself as Joan Geraldine, and at first Laukhin thought that Geraldine was her last name. Later she explained she liked the sound of both her given names together, that she was offering people a choice. They first met in a restaurant on the south side of the river, likely one of the last times he and Tanya had been out together. His friend Kyril Vronkh arrived with one of his students, Irina, who soon afterward became his second wife. Irina brought along Joan Geraldine—a colleague, she said—who in turn had someone in tow, a second secretary from the British embassy. Later, Laukhin called her mostly Joan, and Geraldine now and then in bed. In the rare times she mentioned her, Tanya always called her Joan Geraldine, and always scornfully. She had her reasons, of course, although Joan Geraldine’s blatant pass at him that evening was hardly the first Tanya had witnessed. Far from it. She’d seen it happen so often she was immune to women trying to seduce him, and, anyway, by then she was involved with a doctor at the hospital in Serpukhov where she worked as a respirologist. Or was she already with Vadim? Whichever, she had never been happy with him, Laukhin. Her medical studies had kept her very busy, and the long days in training and nights at hospitals, and later the weekly commute to and from Serpukhov had given him many opportunities. And he was rarely able to say no to an opportunity.