A Question of Return

by Robert Carr

  But he had no desire to return. He had made his bed and he’d sleep in it. Anyway, he was beginning to feel comfortable here. Almost. He might even consider writing in English. Not poetry, of course, but prose.

  * * *

  There was a second postscript in his friend’s letter:

  PPS: I finally dug out a few things about the Fredkins. He was shot in 1940, here in Moscow. His wife died in forty-nine or fifty shortly after her release from Ekibastuz. She tried to find out about the children from where she was, in exile, near Omsk, but she had little time left. I know all this from a second or third cousin of his, an older man I met accidentally in Kharkov and who has the same last name. When I heard it, I asked him if he was any relation to the Moscow Fredkins who were arrested at the end of 1939. Friedkin’s wife had sent him a letter shortly after she was released, but he didn’t answer it. 1949 had been a tense year and he’d simply been afraid. He didn’t know about the children anyway, or not much, and had not been keen at the time to learn more. He heard the little ones had been with her sister for a while, but she had moved away from Kiev, and he didn’t know where. They may have taken the names of the relatives they ended up with, if they were lucky enough.

  It was quiet now. Efim’s lawn gendarmes had finished their noisy task. Laukhin had a vague recollection of seeing Efim’s name in his father’s last notebook. He walked upstairs, pulled the copy from the small bookshelf he kept near his worktable, and sat on his bed. It was the only notebook he kept a copy of at home, and it had been a long time since he had looked at it. He was beginning to doubt his memory because it took him a while to find it, yet there it was: his meticulous father had made a note of Efim’s visit to Lavrushinsky Lane in February 1958, only a cursory mention in a larger entry. He read it in its entirety.

  A giant young man, Efim Apelbaum, came here yesterday to congratulate Tyoma on his first book of poetry. Tyoma had not seen him since high school. He’d changed so much that Tyoma did not recognize him at first. Not a reader of poetry, Efim, by his own admission. Not a reader of anything. Amusing young man, though. He had lunch with us and told us countless stories from his three years of military service.

  This morning a large package with printed copies of Youthful Eminences arrived at the apartment. Tyoma was out. I opened the package, took out a copy, and gazed at the slim volume for a long time. I had tears in my eyes, tears of pride and gratitude for having such a gifted son. A pity Varenka isn’t with me anymore to share this joy.

  I read Tyoma’s poems for an hour, maybe longer, and then took a copy upstairs to the Pasternaks. Zinaida opened the door, wearing a red apron. There was a familiar smell drifting from the kitchen. I said, “Mmmm, boiled potatoes and cabbage, what else could a Russian soul desire.”

  “Your idol is in the bedroom,” she said. “He’s not feeling well. When he’s well he’s elsewhere. But I always have to look after him when he’s not well.”

  I brandished the slim book. “Look, Zinaida Nikolayevna, Tyoma’s first volume of poems. I brought you a copy.”

  She nodded, but did not take it for a closer look. Surly Zinaida, she had long exhausted the store of social graces she came into this world with. “Nice,” she said. “Give it to the poet laureate. I’ve heard rumours he’ll get the Nobel Prize. It will turn out handy in prison.”

  “Zinaida Nikolayevna, don’t be so gloomy. No one would dare touch him if he gets the Nobel.”

  “We’ll still have to eat, won’t we?” She was in one of her moods.

  I asked, “What’s ailing him this time?”

  “He can’t pee.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. He can’t pass water. An infection, probably, but the doctors can’t make up their minds. Go in, he’ll be glad to see you.”

  Boris Leonidovich looked feverish. He lay on his bed in crumpled pyjamas, the cover tossed aside. He said he was in pain, terrible pain. He described it to me at some length, and then, lowering his voice as if it were a secret, said, “They finally found a catheter. A doctor will come tonight. Imagine, Pavel Nikolayevich, putting a tube through it …”

  He made a feeble gesture for me to come closer and went on whispering, “They want me to tell Gallimard to stop the French edition of Zhivago. I won’t do it. I said I was too sick to do anything about it. They are not happy with me, Pavel Nikolayevich, not happy at all. Maybe that’s why no one could find a catheter for me in the whole of Moscow.” He tried to laugh.

  I commiserated with him for a while, and then showed him Tyoma’s slim volume. “For you,” I said. “For you and Zinaida Nikolayevna.”

  He made a sound through his nose. “Zinaida, ha! Zinaida does not read my poetry!”

  Theirs was a spent marriage, yet they carried on. They were too old, too tired, too set in their ways to separate.

  He flipped through Tyoma’s volume, and said, “The proud father bearing gifts. The first of many, I’m sure.” He pushed it back to me. “Tell him to sign it. And I want a dedication, to Uncle Boris or something like that.”

  I said, “Keep it. I’ll get Tyoma to sign another copy. He’s got a whole package of them downstairs. It just arrived.”

  “No, no, take this one back. I won’t be able to read it now, anyway. Bring me one of your books instead, Pavel Nikolayevich.”

  His father and Pasternak became close after the Laukhins moved into the Lavrushinsky Lane building. The Pasternaks’ apartment was a makeshift, five-room, two-storey penthouse, with an internal staircase leading to the upper floor. As a child, Laukhin often perched on the staircase, gazing at the goings-on below him. The Pasternaks had taken over the room upstairs when the poet thought his parents would return to the Soviet Union. They didn’t. Later, from the late forties onwards, the Laukhins and the Pasternaks also had Peredelkino in common.

  They had been an odd pair, Pasternak and his father, but they had liked each other from the very beginning. Even at a literary level, although this was surprising. His father’s novels had an irony that appealed to many readers, including Pasternak. He read them when he was ill or under stress—a backhanded compliment—and even said he had learned “a trick or two about structuring a novel from Pavel Nikolayevich.” One of the little flattering lies that cemented a friendship, Laukhin was certain. Pasternak was also affected by the hero’s surname, Vinograd. Yelena Vinograd had been the muse of Pasternak’s breakthrough book of poems, My Sister Life. What’s more, Oleg Vinograd’s sister, also called Yelena, had an on-again off-again relationship with a poet. If providence had brought them together, Pasternak once declared while tipsy, he “would do all in his power to keep it that way.”

  * * *

  Toward the end, the writing in his father’s journal dried up. The extensive entries he’d written in the mid thirties slowed to a trickle by the late fifties. The same minute lettering, but harder on the eye because of the uncertain, shaky hand. He had completely given up his tight, economical line spacing, and a page often contained no more than a couple of brief, wavy lines. The trail of words dribbled downward after an initial, timid ascent.

  During the two years before his death, he mainly noted down his observations on the tumour that would eventually kill him. There were bemused jottings at first, during the lengthy confirmation of the initial diagnosis, even humorous. “A brain tumour is encouraging news. Our doctors are wrong more often than not, so it could be something else, less threatening.” Or, “Here is a real circus act, keeping the body in balance with no help from the brain.” There were bitter and resentful notes later. At the very end the writing was resigned, then helpless, then confused. Brief sentences or single words. The last entry was one word—seychas (now). The next to last a scrawled blasphemy. Nothing in the last month of his life.

  He had lost his balance and had fallen one morning as he got out of bed. Laukhin heard the thud from his room and rushed to the large bedroom. His father tried to get up on his own, but couldn’t. He looked at Laukhin with a baffled smile, as if saying,
“Look at the fine surprise your old man is pulling off.” It was not much of a surprise, though, because his father had begun to complain of feeling weak the spring after his trip to Yelabuga with Pasternak. His wife’s sudden death a couple of months after the trip had been a blow to him and Laukhin had put his father’s weakness down to that loss. In hindsight, it was more likely that the tumour was already sapping his strength.

  Laukhin remembered mentioning the trip to Yelabuga to Ben during one of their weekly meetings at the beginning of the year. He was already pushing Tsvetayeva on Ben, but hadn’t yet thought of the poetess as the subject of the next bundle. “My father made detailed notes during that trip, thirty pages, maybe more. It’s the last journal entry related to Tsvetayeva. And, in a way, the main entry about her too, although she had already been dead for fourteen years. It’s worth your while, Ben, to have a thorough look at it.”

  It was in the second to last notebook, this long description of the trip his father and Pasternak took together in the fall of 1955 to Yelabuga, the small town on the Kama River where Tsvetayeva died in the early days of the Great Patriotic War. Reading it again and preparing it for the bundle, Laukhin noticed something he hadn’t before—“Pasternak” was now mostly “Boris Leonidovich.” He surmised that as his father’s friendship and admiration for Pasternak grew, he found it more appropriate or more natural to use the first name and the patronymic of the poet. He might not even have been aware of the switch. Laukhin found the use of “Boris Leonidovich” fitting for the trip, and decided to keep it. The New Yorker editor had grumbled about it, but to Laukhin’s mind the addressing form of the name expressed both the warmth and the irony his father felt about his famous friend during their last years.

  Pasternak had called their trip a pilgrimage. He had to make it, had no choice if he was to have any peace of mind. He had not been able to do it earlier, but, with “the thaw” after Stalin’s death, he felt he could postpone it no longer. His flapping heart was a signal too, a warning that he might not have many seasons left. He had asked Tsvetayeva’s daughter to accompany him but, only recently freed, she was too weak and could not face the trip. She also feared she wouldn’t be allowed to return to Moscow. Pasternak told Pavel Laukhin he was secretly relieved when Alya declined to go. She had changed after fifteen years in camps and exile, no longer the easy-going, smiling Alya he had once known. There was now something fiery, direct, intense about her that reminded him of her mother. She suggested he take Olga with him. She and Olga Ivinskaya had become fast friends since Alya’s return. There was no surprise there, as they had the work-camp experience in common, although Ivinskaya’s time there had been much shorter and she had been among the first to be released after Stalin’s death. Olga, to whom Alya had mentioned the trip before she made the suggestion to him, quickly began to make plans for the trip, but Pasternak demurred. Zinaida was already upset by his renewed interest in Ivinskaya and would have made his life miserable. His children would not have been pleased either.

  And so it happened that Pasternak set out with Pavel Laukhin as his sole companion. Best companion too, all things considered, because Pavel Laukhin would also look after the more practical aspects of the trip, details that he, the cloud-dwelling poet, had no inclination or ability to deal with. He expected others to look after these things. He would travel but not without some minimal comforts, and he counted on his friend to cover any deficit if the expedition turned out to be too costly.

  His father and Pasternak left on their trip to Yelabuga at the beginning of October 1955. At Pasternak’s insistence, they travelled by riverboat, just as Tsvetayeva had done fourteen years earlier, in August 1941.

  Wednesday, 5 October, 1955

  We have not seen the sky since embarking. The river stretches endlessly in front of us, grey and brown in daylight, dark grey and gloomy at dusk. We stay on deck as much as we can, but after half an hour we return to our cabins shivering. It’s too cold and damp. The forays we make from our cabins are short and energetic. Comical too. To warm up, we try to walk fast, but, for Boris Leonidovich, who’s ten years older than I am, a venerable sixty-five, it’s a struggle. He tells me again about his weak heart and his belief that it will soon kill him. Sometimes, I run ahead and do a quick lap on my own. I also jump and slap my sides and shoulders. Boris Leonidovich claims that I have an odd way of jumping, almost backwards. He fears that I’ll end up sprawled on my back.

  I did not expect such cold and I’m not suitably dressed. Boris Leonidovich has been more cautious—Zinaida packed warm clothes in the two large suitcases he brought onboard—and has loaned me one of his long-sleeve undershirts, frayed, yellowed, ancient. He jokes it might have belonged to his father. Boris Leonidovich’s eyes are red from the cold and wind, and he has a nasty cough that keeps him, and me, from sleeping at night. I can hear his cough from my cabin, across the shared salon.

  We’ve been told that starting tonight or tomorrow morning the temperature will be back to the seasonal average, even a bit warmer.

  Every day Boris Leonidovich talks about Tsvetayeva. A duty, he says. In August 1941, two months after the war began, he went to the river station in Moscow to see Tsvetayeva and her son off on what turned out to be her last journey. She and Georgy were being evacuated, like so many others.

  “Remember those days of panic, Pavel Nikolayevich, with the Fascists closing in on Moscow? We left too, a couple of weeks after her. Anyway, at the last minute I had to run and buy bread and sausages and cheese for the two travellers. Tsvetayeva had brought no provisions for the trip. It wasn’t easy—the shelves were empty and I had to pay a fortune. Imagine, Pavel Nikolayevich. What did she think she was boarding, the Queen Mary?”

  For Boris Leonidovich this trip is like a wake. It’s also his reparation to Tsvetayeva. We must, he insists, reminisce and talk about her. I don’t mind. The remorse gnaws at his heart. He’s often frantic when he talks about her, almost incoherent, and I wonder how this can be—our foremost poet. But at other times, he is calmer, the pleasant, melodious stutter under control, his charm in full bloom, his words chosen with care and power, and I could listen to him forever. I am, as usual, in awe of him.

  Here and there the river is so wide that you can’t see its banks.

  There is a dining room—quite large, and with an odd odor that I can’t quite make out—where we are served our meals. We eat our lunches at long rectangular tables with fixed benches. First drinks are served before noon, so the room is often filled with smoke and shouts, and we eat quickly, without lingering. In the evening, a couple of round tables with cloths and chairs are brought out and set in a corner, near the captain’s table, for the first class passengers.

  The riverboat is called Kirov. We have the best living quarters on board, a suite—three cabins in a row—and Boris Leonidovich assures me that he got it as a special favour. Dovlatov’s cousin works in the administration of the inner waters, and Dovlatov owes him a lot. He does not elaborate and I do not pry. (Favour or not, they were not cheap. I know, because I paid for them, Boris Leonidovich being hard up financially right now, with his dental work and repairs to the dacha. I don’t mind, even if he never pays me back, which may very well be the case. After all, The Ambassador’s Ring has sold almost a half a million copies, and there’s word of re-issuing my first three novels.)

  The sleeping cabins are small, and once the bed is unstowed, there isn’t much space for anything else, but the cabin we share in the middle—the one we both call the salon, with an exaggerated French accent, and in which we spend most of our time—is large and well furnished. Plenty of light comes in during the day through the wide windows. There are two swivel chairs in front of them, and we often sit there reading, chatting, watching the river-world slide by. The windows cannot be opened, but a door leads to a small deck outside. A battered sofa and an oblong cherry-wood table with four chairs complete the furnishings of the salon. The table is exquisite, with an inlaid oval stripe, like a racetrack, in the midd
le.

  The steward, Arkhip, late thirties, smelling of vodka, and sour-faced prior to a considerable tip I provided at Boris Leonidovich’s insistence, told us that the boat has been on the river for more than twenty years. Boris Leonidovich wondered aloud whether Tsevtaeva and her son had travelled on it to Yelabuga. He shook his head annoyed; he should have remembered, having seen her off, but couldn’t. He asked Arkhip whether he’d been with the boat from the very beginning. No, no, only after the war, he said. He’d been with the Murmansk fleet during the war, and an inch from losing his life. It turned out to be a long story, with the outcome that he was much happier floating on sweet river waters.

  During our morning walks we pass through the second-class quarters. Mainly peasants on short trips, a few blue-collar workers and soldiers on furlough. The second-class comrades are quiet in the morning, their stares vacant. After lunch, and especially in the evening, they begin to drink steadily from their own supplies of homebrew and exchange words and nasty, callous laughter. After night falls, there are shouts and now and then fights. I’m fascinated by them, by their animal acceptance and attachment to this routine. Boris Leonidovich is, I feel, repelled by the sight of them—not that he does not enjoy a tipple now and then. He always walks faster as we pass through second class. They talk about us, I’m sure, and make jokes and laugh behind our backs.

  “The river,” Boris Leonidovich said on one of our morning walks, “is like the Russian soul. Now wide and generous, now narrow, furious, mean-spirited, cruel. But, most often, murky, grey, patient, load-bearing.”

  Wednesday – evening, 5 October, 1955