A Question of Return

by Robert Carr

  “And I did it. I snuck away, found the small room, and slipped the envelope under her pillow. Later I learned that she had become used to such handouts, but she never learned that the money that time, and likely many other times, came from my father.”

  Laukhin told the story in Russian while they were still on the train. Colson was delighted by the tale, and he was beaming as he related it to his wife.

  “I should have told the story in English,” Laukhin said as they got off the train.

  “I understood it,” Kate Emslie said. “Well, parts of it. I knew it was about Akhmatova.”

  “You’ll learn Russian in no time,” Laukhin told her after he stopped laughing.

  The middle-aged man with the child he’d seen near the Kievsky Station tower and then on the train got off too. Why on earth would they bother? Was there more to the pair of Canadians he just met? He’d never heard yet of a child being used to deflect suspicion. Maybe they weren’t following them at all.

  “He got on her nerves at the end. She got tired of Pasternak, of the charade, of the bumbling, naïve, pure soul.”

  “Akhmatova?” Colson Emslie asked.

  “Yes.”

  Laukhin knew he was performing for them, but he was enjoying it; an actor doing his best to entertain his audience, and Colson’s obvious pleasure only egged him on. The evening at the Ardovs was a long entry in his father’s journal, and Laukhin had read it several times. As he described the Ardovs’ apartment and the carefully selected participants at the reading, Laukhin wasn’t sure whether it was his own recollection, his father’s notes, or a combination of the two. Most likely the latter, but with a dab of additional colour, here and there, like an old painting restored. He had been, after all, an apprentice of the original artist. He felt a surge of enthusiasm. He’d tell them stories, the long-limbed Canadian professor and his attractive young wife, and they’d forget their—his—disappointment with Chukovskaya. It was then, passing by the small Transfiguration Church on their way to the village, that Laukhin decided that his father’s journal would not be a simple rendition of what he had hurriedly noted down, but that he, Laukhin, would make it more vivid, livelier. He would write with his father and, in a way, be with him again.

  * * *

  Ben, Paul, and Helen were already at the Emslies when he arrived. Holding a glass filled mainly with ice cubes, Ron Martens, one of Colson’s students, was describing something round and large to Paul, waving his free hand above his head in a wide arc. Ron’s Ph.D. thesis, close to completion and said to be excellent, was on Leonid Dobychin, an obscure Leningrad writer who disappeared mysteriously in 1936. Ron had spent a long time on it, and Colson was keen to see him finish. Laukhin once heard Colson tell Ron, after a seminar on Sholokov’s novel Virgin Soil Upturned, where the speaker, a robust women from the Moscow Literary Institute, spent much of her discourse listing the reasons for the lengthy gestation of the novel, “Good God, Ron, I hope it won’t take you twenty-eight years too to finish your thesis.”

  Holding a glass, Colson came toward him saying that two of his students were not able to come, and that Helen was helping Kate in the kitchen. “Kate is making okroshka soup and pelmeny,” he went on. “Very ambitious, especially the pelmeny. There was a bit of a crisis this morning—the dough, it seemed, was not elastic enough—but things have stabilized. You said you might bring somebody with you, Tyoma. Poor Kate, she counted on a dozen guests.”

  Colson was the only one among his non-Russian friends and acquaintances who sometimes called him Tyoma. From his damp face, Laukhin gathered that Colson had begun drinking long before his guests arrived.

  “I failed,” Laukhin said. “I should have let you know.”

  Ben approached, pointing an empty glass at the kitchen. “Things are looking good in there,” he said, “but I’d chase Helen out, you know. She’s a hazard. She always claims she’s helping the hostess, but she invariably ends up destroying the dinner. It’s still vreditelstvo, isn’t it, even if the damage isn’t deliberate? I need another drink.” His student had had a head start too, Laukhin thought. Ben must have heard what Laukhin said to Colson because he added, “I also said—well hoped—I’d bring someone with me.”

  “Never mind, Ben,” Colson said. “Kate invited a friend she’d like you to meet. Kate sees the world as a large set of couples and singles, with the joining of the singles into couples as the recipe for happiness. The truth is that Jennifer—that’s her name—is not exactly Kate’s friend, but the daughter of a distant relative of hers, in Toronto.” He frowned. “I’m not sure, now. Perhaps Kate invited Jen on account of Paul.”

  Helen came out from the kitchen with Kate trailing her, and another young woman who wore a pearl-grey halter-top and black slacks. Kate gave Laukhin a warm hug. Helen carried her now visible pregnancy with an imperious waddling, “Mission accomplished” written all over her face. The young woman in black slacks introduced herself as Jennifer. She took a sip of iced vodka and made a face before telling Ben that Kate was trying to get her drunk. “She’s not really my aunt, but I have no aunts and I have always wanted one and, as long as Auntie Kate doesn’t mind, I’ll continue to call her auntie.”

  Laukhin refilled his glass before sitting down for dinner. On Kate’s instructions, Laukhin sat on her right, with Ben across the table from him, on Kate’s left. Paul was separated from Ben by Jennifer, and Helen sat on Laukhin’s left.

  He listened to Ben telling Jennifer it might be a long boring evening for her because, inevitably, they ended up talking shop. Jennifer said that, although she was a law student, she wasn’t allergic to books and literature. She had slender, graceful arms, and when she smiled at Ben her eyes were somewhat mocking but not telling him to keep away. When Paul asked her something, she turned away from Ben.

  It was going to be a long grey dinner. Tanya used to say that, “grey time” or “a grey slow evening” whenever she had a dull or difficult time in the company of others. The image of Audrey sitting beside him floated briefly in his mind. Had she not stumbled at the airport on that last issue of the Paris Review, she would be sitting there, beside or across him, and the colours and the scents of the evening would have been different. He tried to listen to what Paul was telling Jennifer, a typical story of his, a version of one of the fights his parents regularly had with the city of Manchester. A Hungarian-Russian couple, the Karmans owned a corner store in a mixed neighborhood of that city, a store that seemed to be in a chronic state of near insolvency. It didn’t stop them from sending Paul money every other month or so, but, if asked what his parents were doing back home in the UK, he was fond of saying that they were running a corner store into bankruptcy. Short, skinny, with slicked-back black hair carved by a part that began behind his left ear and ended nowhere, Paul was a chain smoker and unable to sit still for long. He liked beer and noisy pubs. A quick drunk, Paul would often start singing or get into an argument. He usually emerged unscathed, but one Monday he appeared at his weekly session with Laukhin with a black eye he could barely open. Ben told Laukhin he had once rescued a penniless Paul from a pub at closing time. He also complained he often ended up footing their pub bills because Paul had lost the little money he had betting on horses.

  It was in his dealings with Paul that Laukhin felt most unsuitable in his position. He kept telling himself he was there to teach his students about literature, not how to navigate life. Drinking he understood, it was familiar to him, embedded in the Russian or Soviet fabric. Gambling, though, was not; it had disappeared or faded, or had never had the same hold, and betting on horses didn’t even seem like gambling. He’d been stunned last fall when Paul asked him for a loan to bridge-fund his gambling debts. Paul had referred, more delicately, to his wrong choices. “What kind of wrong choices?” Laukhin asked. “At the races, Artyom Pavlovich, horse races. Bad luck has followed me for a month now. It’s temporary, and I’ll recover. Believe it or not, I’m quite good at it. Seven hundred dollars, for two weeks. I owe this a
mount to impatient people. You’ll get your money in two weeks, I promise. My parents are sending me some, and then the stipend is due too. It all comes at the same time, you see.” He wrote him a check, of course, but wasn’t sure about it at all, and the next day he talked to Colson who launched into inane generalities about gambling as an addiction. Later, after asking if Paul had borrowed money from him before, his colleague had some common sense advice. “No? All right, you’ve had him as a student for what—two, three years? If he does it again, then you can think about it, but for now forget it. You’re not running a nursery. Betting on horses, well, that’s his choice, as long as he functions as a student. He’s a good student—isn’t he?—and you’re happy with him.”

  Did he have a weakness for Paul, a tendency to turn a blind eye because he was the only one of his students who wrote poetry, or who admitted to it, although he dismissed his own efforts as amateurish. He told Laukhin he had come to it rather late, reading Russian literature at Cambridge. He had not had much of a life there, going through a melancholy period and having to be very careful with his bursaries and maintenance grants. He turned to writing verse, and met with some success. Studying with Art Laukhin, in Toronto, had seemed his next best step. Colson once asked Laukhin what he thought of Paul’s poetry. “It’s all right, now and then,” Laukhin answered. “As he drinks, there’s a narrow window of spot-on alcoholic content during which he wrings out a couple of good lines. He has to learn that such bursts are not enough. He’ll mature late, as a poet, but he will, I’m sure.”

  * * *

  Jennifer’s hair was gathered in a ponytail at the back. Large hoop earrings emphasized the frailty of her neck. The skin on her bare shoulders seemed marble-smooth, and Laukhin wished he could touch it to confirm his visual impression. He pictured his lips sliding down her back, just under where the straps crossed, and then slowly journeying to even sweeter spots. He wondered about how he might remove her halter top, and what lay beneath, and about how much vodka and wine he had drunk. He imagined Jennifer telling him to go ahead and take it off, but without using his hands.

  He was nothing but a lecherous old man. A lecherous tree. A few minutes earlier he thought of Audrey by his side, and now he was imagining removing a much younger woman’s clothes with his teeth. He turned and saw Kate looking at him and wondered whether she had guessed the lewd path of his thoughts.

  “I read your interview,” Kate said, “the one in the Paris Review. Colson was having a chuckle over it last night, and I read it this morning.”

  “A chuckle? There wasn’t anything comic in it.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. The way you talked about Solzhenitsyn—it was amusing how you tried to hide your dislike of the man. And Zladsky, sorry, little man Zladsky. You’ll soon be very unpopular with your fellow Russian émigrés. Probably are already.”

  “Zladsky started it.”

  “Did you enjoy it?”

  “Enjoy it?”

  “The interview. Perhaps I should have said the interviewer. Colson saw her briefly with you, and said she was very attractive.”

  “He saw her? Where?”

  “Oh, at Alumni Hall probably, I’m not sure.”

  “You’re smiling. Why?”

  “I shouldn’t?”

  “That’s all that Colson said? Nothing else? Nothing titillating?”

  “Should he have? Was there something else?”

  It had been Colson, no doubt, and he told Kate about it. He could hear the pillow talk: “There was no one in the room that I could see, Kate, but I heard something. I took a few steps inside and saw the interviewer’s skirt on the floor. Her panties were on Art’s desk, on top of an old copy of Ogoniok. I saw a pair of long boots too. There was huffing and puffing coming from behind the desk, and I thought it best to retreat discreetly.” At the other end of the table Colson was listening to Ron Martens.

  Laukhin changed the subject and told Kate, who had met Kyril Vronkh during one of the Emslies visits to Moscow, that he had received an odd letter from his old friend.

  “In what way odd?”

  “He suggested I should return to the Soviet Union.”

  “What?”

  Ben lifted his eyes and looked at him.

  “He said he was only a messenger of the Writers’ Union, but that they were promising me the moon and more.”

  “Like?” Kate asked.

  “My poetry published, my father’s journal published, an apartment and a dacha. Even a teaching position, if I was interested.”

  “Do you believe them? Are you tempted?”

  “The oddest thing was the freedom with which Kyril wrote. Either, as he implied, he was a messenger and wrote with the full blessing of all concerned, or indeed something is happening under Gorbachev.”

  “You wouldn’t go back, though, would you?”

  “I wouldn’t.”

  “Besides, you couldn’t leave your students in the lurch,” Helen said.

  * * *

  After dinner he cornered Colson. “In February, when the young woman from the Paris Review interviewed me, you were the one who opened the door to my office, weren’t you?”

  “Did I come in?”

  “A step or two only. Took a peek, then shut the door and left.”

  “Without saying anything?”

  “You made a sound—an exclamation.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “You know why.”

  “I do? Did I see something horrifying? Something untoward?”

  “Aha!”

  “Aha what? What were you doing with her?”

  “At some point, close to noon, she took her clothes off and …”

  “But you locked the door, didn’t you?”

  “I had lost my key.”

  “You were fucking the Paris Review interviewer in your unlocked office. Wow!”

  “She fucked me. Before I knew it, she was almost naked.”

  “It’s a fine point.”

  “Who was it then, Colson? If it wasn’t you, who could have been?”

  “Anybody.”

  “And not say a word about it?”

  “A gentleman. Horrified, of course, but raising the matter would have been beneath his dignity. Or a gentlewoman.”

  “No one else would have resisted embarrassing me.”

  “Maybe it was one of your students. Or one of the cleaners.”

  “At noon?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You smiled—I saw you smiling. It was you.”

  “It wasn’t me.”

  “It was you, and you told Kate about it too. She sounded as if she knew about the whole episode.”

  “You’ve had too much to drink, Tyoma.”

  “That I certainly have.”

  On the subway ride back home, the more he thought about it, the more certain he was that it had been Colson. What a relief. It was his warped sense of humour to keep it from his friend, to let him stew without knowing for sure.

  * * *

  The next day he bought thirty-three red roses at a flower shop on Bloor Street. He told the florist to select the most beautiful roses she had. These turned out to be the most expensive as well, but she assured him that for that number of roses she’d give him a good price, and free delivery. He put a small note among the flowers:

  I have many faults, Audrey, but callousness is not one of them. I can only repeat that one day you’ll understand. I hope I’m not wrong in my hopes. I beg you, do not act rashly. Do not make a decision based on wrong premises.

  Art.

  PS: I’m lonely and wretched.

  A couple of days later he received a card from Audrey:

  That was very sweet, Art. And foolish. The roses are wonderful and I can’t take my eyes off them.

  Audrey.

  PS: Come Thursday night to the gallery. There is an opening soirée. Horrible stuff—art to break your heart, as Lezzard says—but also wine and sandwiches.

  PPS: I do hope you�
��ll come.

  Sunday, 9 October, 1955

  (Early Monday morning.) The night is slowly lifting. We spent the whole of yesterday in Kazan, marooned, waiting for a spare part to arrive. The boat is still moored, and there are shouts from the dock that amplify the overall stillness.

  I hasten to record Boris Leonidovich’s account of his visit to Bolshevo on the last day of June 1939, as I heard it from him only a few hours ago. Korotkova was away from the boat the entire day, but she made sure we were looked after, and in the late afternoon surly Arkhip brought us a tray of goodies. We overdid it last night, drinking and talking, and then Boris Leonidovich suddenly began telling me about his visit to Bolshevo. I write it now in his words:

  Early that Friday morning, Marina’s daughter, Alya Efron, phoned me from the weekly where she worked as an illustrator. I was busy with translations from Petofi, a task I had started with little enthusiasm, but to which I was slowly warming up. Anyway, I couldn’t be too choosy since I desperately needed the money. I worked quickly from glosses and from German translations.

  When Alya phoned, I already knew Tsvetayeva was in Bolshevo because Alya had called to tell me some ten days earlier, shortly after her mother returned to Russia. She phoned me often that spring, whenever I was in Moscow. And I was in Moscow most of the time, all by myself, because we were moving to another dacha, and Zinaida was in Peredelkino supervising the move. Alya was full of life, radiant, as only women in love can be. People didn’t smile much in those days—nor do they now—but she did. She was always with Mulya Gurevich—do you remember him, Pavel Nikolayevich? She was a sweet girl—well, not a girl anymore, she was twenty-six or twenty-seven already—and I was very fond of her and her bright laughter. I first met her in Paris, in 1935. I met her father at the same time, and I liked him too.