A Question of Return

by Robert Carr

  Alya began by curtly asking me when I intended to visit her mother. It was unlike her. There was reproach in her tone, and dismay, even exasperation. I must have given a non-committal answer—I was quite busy with the translation and I had a deadline to meet, and I needed to take advantage of Zinaida’s and the children’s absence to concentrate. She cut me short, and said I must go to Bolshevo right away to see her mother, who was not doing well. Not well at all, Alya repeated when I kept silent. Her mother was very upset, angry with everybody, with her and with her father—especially her father. She was screaming at Georgy and had even slapped him. She was barely talking to the Klepinins, the large family with whom they shared the dacha in Bolshevo. No one understood what was happening with her mother, and no one knew what to do. Alya hoped that seeing me, a poet and a beloved old friend, would be good for her. “You must go, Boris Leonidovich, I beg you,” Alya said. “You’re the only one who might calm her down. We don’t know what else to do.” She added, in a whisper, that I should not tell anyone about the visit.

  I couldn’t say no, Pavel Nikolayevich, although I wasn’t looking forward to seeing Tsvetayeva. I’m ashamed but it’s true. I felt guilty then, and I’m ashamed now. I just didn’t have the stomach for it. But I agreed in the end, and Alya told me how to find the dacha where Efron and now Marina and their son were living.

  It was a hot day. I took the eleven o’clock commuter train and walked from the Bolshevo platform. By the time I found the dacha, beyond the village, I was tired and thirsty. There was a dusty, dark blue car parked in front of the house, with a man asleep in the driver’s seat. Tall pine trees encroached on the large wooden bungalow from three sides. On a bench in the front yard, in a small clearing with a well to the left of the house, Tsvetayeva sat smoking. There was no one else around. I could hear a baby crying in the house. She didn’t look up at me as I approached, or she glanced up without recognizing me. I had aged since I last saw her in Paris four years earlier, and so had she. Thin, a nondescript grey dress, hair cut short—grey too—sunken eyes. She looked terrible. She ignored me as I walked closer, and it was only when I said, “Marina Ivanovna, my dear, it’s me, Boris,” that she lifted her eyes. We embraced awkwardly and I sat down beside her. She asked how I was doing, how Zinaida was, the children, Yevgenya. She asked what I was working on. She did it all properly, politely, and she listened to my answers, but I’m not sure she heard them. She dropped her cigarette, crushed it, and lit another one. Her hands were trembling and she fought with the matches. She caught me looking at her efforts and said, “I never thought lighting a match would be so hard.” I lit a cigarette myself and smoked with her. I asked about her husband. She said Efron had gone to Moscow that morning—a car had picked him up. She added that it happened now and then, although her husband was not a well man. She repeated the last sentence about Efron’s state several times, softly, as if to let me know that there were several ways to interpret what she said. She then added, although I didn’t ask, “Nina Nikolayevna has taken the children on a little excursion to give me some peace and quiet, to let me recover. I had … I had another meltdown this morning. I’m not doing very well—but then, why would I?”

  “Nina Nikolayevna?”

  Klepinin’s wife, she answered. They had known the Klepinins in Paris, and the two families were something between acquaintances and friends. The Klepinins had returned from France with their brood, six or seven of them, at about the same time as her husband. A remarkable couple in their own way, Tsvetayeva said, members in Paris of the Eurasian Movement and active in the Russian Orthodox Church. Klepinina had been a well-known scientist. She liked poetry, and tried her best to make Tsvetayeva’s new life bearable. Nikolai Klepinin, her husband, had been an officer in Denikin’s army, and he might have met Efron while they were fighting together, although Tsvetayeva wasn’t sure. He later studied at Boston University, wrote for newspapers, published two books. Like Efron, who went by the name Andreyev since his return to Russia, the Klepinins now went by a different last name.

  I was very thirsty from the long walk from the station, and I told Marina Ivanovna that I’d go into the house to fetch some water. I insisted she remain seated, that I could easily do it myself. Two people were drinking in the sitting room when I entered. One was, I gathered, Nikolai Klepinin. Like Efron, he would be shot two years later. The other man, somewhat younger than Klepinin, and much better dressed, seemed upset by my sudden appearance in the house. He stood up and asked me in an imperious voice, “Who are you? What are you doing here?” I told them my name, that I was an old friend of Tsvetayeva, and had come to visit her. I added I wanted a glass of water. “Who told you she was in Bolshevo?” the man asked in the same curt voice. I said her daughter was worried about her mother’s health and she thought my presence would do her good.

  Klepinin stood up with some difficulty and shook my hand, saying it was a delight to meet such a famous poet. He seemed genuinely pleased to meet me. He disappeared for a moment and came back with a carafe of cold water and a glass. “Take it outside with you,” he said. “Marina Ivanovna may be thirsty as well.” He smelled of alcohol.

  I asked for the place of use—mesta pol’zovaniia —the wonderful euphemism we have in our language for the toilet. Klepinin smiled and pointed his finger to the door and said the outhouse was behind the house.

  “Or the woods,” the other man said.

  Tsvetayeva was smoking again when I rejoined her. I asked who the other man in the house was. She didn’t know. She said he visited quite often and talked in a whisper with Klepinin or her husband. “A horrible man, I think,” she added with a shudder.

  I offered Tsvetayeva a glass of water and we sat there in the silent shade of the pine trees, the summer buzz of insects around us. I hoped that in time she’d begin to talk, and she did. But what I’m telling you now, Pavel Nikolayevich, is not just her story, as she opened up to me that day under the Bolshevo pines, but also the additions and clarifications Alya Efron has made since her return to Moscow after sixteen years of camps and exile. She’s not the young, laughing Alya anymore, as you can imagine.

  Alya and her boyfriend, Mulya Gurevich, met Tsvetayeva and Georgy at the Leningradsky station when they first arrived back in Moscow. After she embraced her daughter, Marina looked around her and, not seeing Efron, asked why he had not come to the station too. Alya said her father was not feeling well and was waiting for them in Bolshevo. He had not been in good health since he returned to the Soviet Union. Marina’s next question was why hadn’t her younger sister, Anastasya, come to the station to see her after so many years? Alya looked at Mulya Gurevich who shrugged and said they should hurry to the Yaroslavsky station to catch the train to Bolshevo. He told the porter who was waiting for them to lead them through the square so that Tsvetayeva could get a quick whiff of her beloved Moscow. Excited, Georgy was running around his older sister. Outside the station, Tsvetayeva stopped and took a long look around her. She told Georgy to calm down or he’d get separated from them. She then explained to him that there were three railway stations in Kalamchyovskaya Square, and that was why people called it the Three Stations Square. Alya said the square was now called Komsomolskaya. Tsvetayeva looked at her daughter without comprehension. She was overwhelmed by the swarming multitudes, and by her own memories.

  The train was crowded, but Mulya managed to get two seats in one compartment. He and Georgy stood in the corridor, their backs against the compartment’s glass door. Tsvetayeva looked around her. An old woman and a young boy, probably her grandchild, were talking to each other, but the others were quiet. Unsmiling faces, shabby clothes. Tsvetayeva asked Alya again about Anastasya. Alya said she’d tell her another time. Another time? Why another time? But Alya looked around the compartment and didn’t answer.

  Many people got off at Mitishchi, and there were only few left standing in the corridor. Alya told her mother that Mulya made her very happy. She went out and leaned against him in the corridor. Tsv
etayeva followed after a while and asked Alya again about Anastasya. Alya looked around her and whispered that Anastasya was in prison. What? Yes, she’d been arrested. When? Why? In 1937, in September. She was in Tarusa when they came for her. Why, in God’s name? Alya shook her head and said she didn’t know. Why didn’t you tell me, write to me, about this? Alya said she couldn’t. Marina got very upset. Couldn’t? What do you mean, couldn’t?

  Mulya said, softly, “I know it’s upsetting, Marina Ivanovna, but Alya doesn’t know—nobody knows anything.”

  Tsvetayeva asked about Andrey, her nephew—what was he saying, how was he coping? Alya whispered that they took him too, at the same time they took his mother. They arrested Andryusha as well? Yes. What for? Alya shook her head—she didn’t know. Had anybody else in the family been imprisoned? Alya looked at Mulya and said with a sigh, “Father’s brother-in-law, Vera’s husband.”

  Her head spinning, Tsvetayeva had more questions. Whispered questions—she understood that many things were not talked about loudly in the country she had just returned to. How long had Sergey been in Bolshevo? Since he arrived. She, Alya, had lived in Bolshevo until recently too. Why Bolshevo and not Moscow? That’s where they had told him to stay for a while. They? Who were they? His employers. Who? Who pays his salary? Alya looked at Mulya, and Mulya told Tsvetayeva that it would be better if her husband explained all this to her.

  Where did Alya work? For the weekly journal Revue de Moscou, published in French. Alya then added, laughing, “Mom, try to smile. I’ve never been happier. We are together again, and Mulya is very good to me. It’s going to be all right, you’ll see.”

  Tsvetayeva had looked forward to seeing Efron for almost two years, but the terrible news about her sister and her nephew and her sister-in-law’s husband, and Alya’s whispers and reluctance to talk, petrified her. Later she tried her best to put on a cheerful face, but she found it very hard. The lack of privacy made it even harder for her, with ten people living in the same house and constant noise around her. She didn’t think she had done much since she had arrived in Bolshevo except wash dishes and cover her ears. She was cracking up, she was certain. Everybody got on her nerves, her family, the Klepinins, the friends and relatives and other visitors who came to the dacha now and then. She was fearful too, a fear that was new to her, a fear whose source or cause was difficult to define, even harder to acknowledge. She’d wake up at night, shivering. Sometimes—well, he’d noticed—she’d have trouble even lighting a match. She was dismayed, but she didn’t know how to hide her worries, her fear, her despair. It took time to acquire that ability.

  Sitting with her on the wooden bench under the pines, I told Tsvetayeva that everybody in the country felt that fear. “In our building in Lavrushinsky Lane,” I said, “the residents want to switch off the elevator at night. It keeps them awake wondering where it will stop and who’ll be the next one taken away.” It was true—but I meant to lighten things up. And I added in the same vein that there was a sign in the elevator saying it was prohibited to flush books down the toilet. Seeing the way she looked at me, I gave up and told her she should try to write. “That’s what keeps us going,” I said. “Write your wonderful poems. I beg you, Marina Ivanovna, do not give up.” A stupid thing to say, but I was at a loss.

  She said, “Write? Write? Look at my hands, look at my fingers. I wash dishes and I smoke—that’s what I do all day long.”

  “We need your poems, Marina Ivanovna.”

  “No one needs my poems, Boris Leonidovich. Anyway, to write you require peace of mind and a place of your own, however small. Where should I write? In the forest?”

  She told me she had demanded explanations from her husband. And in time, alone in their bedroom, she had learned a few things. Not as much as she had hoped, because Efron himself had no answer to many questions.

  Like Alya, he didn’t know why Anastasya and her son had been arrested. It had been a mistake, of course, and they’d be released, he assured her. He, Efron, had sent letters in support of them. He had asked questions about them too, but had not received any answers. Not yet.

  One mystery was quickly solved. The Bolshevo dacha they were all living in belonged to the NKVD. She asked her husband the reason why. Was he being paid by the NKVD? Had he been working for the NKVD in France as well? She begged him, “Seryozha, Seryozhenka, tell me it’s not true, please. Tell me the police in France were not right to say, when they interviewed me, that you had been involved in kidnappings and assassinations. Tell me that my friends in Paris were wrong to accuse you and shun me. I swore to them you weren’t an NKVD agent.”

  Efron’s answers were slow in coming, but they came eventually, and she understood the terrible truth. Her Seryozha had worked for the NKVD for a long time. He had lied to her for years. She accused him of betraying his friends and comrades. Was there anything worse that that? Was there anything that could justify that?

  He replied that he had had to find meaning in his life, and a way to return home. He had felt for a long time that he could no longer live abroad. It had been the only way. And he believed in the new Russia.

  She thought she’d go crazy. Her Seryozha, a former White officer, was hiding under a different name in an NKVD dacha in Bolshevo, all expenses paid. When they snatched him in France, with the French police closing in on him, the NKVD had a simple message for him: We’ll take care of you, just keep mum, change your name and stay put until we tell you otherwise.

  He believed in the new Russia? Was the price not too high? What kind of people were they, the builders of the new Russia, if they required such deeds as the price of admission?

  Later she asked why he hadn’t warned her, hadn’t written to her about Anastasya and her son. He said the letters would not have gotten through. She said he could have found a way to tell her to delay her return until matters cleared. He could have, for example, written to her to stay in Paris for a while and look after her sister while she was so sick. Anything to alert her. There were people who travelled from the Soviet Union to France—why not send word with one of them? He had not trusted them? Not one of them? He asked what would she have lived on in France, she and Georgy? Here, in the Soviet Union they would not starve and be humiliated, and Georgy would get a good education. Anyway, he had not been able to do it—neither he, nor Alya. “In God’s name, why not?” It had been the only way to be all together. All of them, the whole family. “Together?” Yes, both he and Alya had agreed on that. “Together? Together in prison, Seriozhenka? Or in the grave?” Marina, don’t talk like that, please.

  She was trapped, she told me under the Bolshevo pines. Trapped with no escape. She was empty, unable to feel anything. The only thing that kept her going was Georgy. She couldn’t abandon him.

  The man who had been talking to Klepinin came out of the house and walked toward us. Klepinin staggered after him. The man stopped a few feet in front of the bench and, pointing a finger at me, said, “You have not been here, you don’t know this place, you have not met any of us. You must forget everything about this visit. It’s a terrible breach of security, and I’ll have to report it.”

  With that, he turned around and left.

  That was the story of his visit to Bolshevo to see Tsvetayeva. Boris Leonidovich remained quiet for a while and then said, “We should turn in.”

  But he didn’t move. Instead, he went on, “Two months later, in August, Alya was arrested in Bolshevo. They took her away right under her mother’s eyes. And in October they took Efron away. Tsvetayeva witnessed that too. She never saw them again.”

  It began to rain, a light rain, and a wind seemed to rise from the water. I closed the doors to the deck.

  “Can you imagine, Pavel Nikolayevich, what her Bolshevo days must have been like?”

  I couldn’t answer that.

  Later, I asked, “I heard Mulya Gurevich was working for the secret police too. What happened to him?”

  Boris Leonidovich shrugged. “They all worked for the
secret police, all the expats who returned to the Soviet Union and had contact with foreigners. Mulya was no exception. He was shot in fifty-two. He survived unscathed for many years only to be taken away and executed shortly before Stalin’s death. Alya told me this not that long ago. She was pregnant with Mulya’s child when she was taken to Lubyanka. She miscarried in prison.”

  He stood up and sighed. “Bolshevo! I spent two months in the sanatorium there, at the beginning of 1953, after my heart attack. Well, you know that. A blissful misfortune, my heart attack, in many ways. Unlike Tsvetayeva’s, my Bolshevo days were peaceful and quiet, a time of reconsiderations, of gathering thoughts and forces. I knew little about the storm outside the sanatorium, about the Doctors’ Plot and the mad plan to relocate Jews, and I wasn’t forced to sign troglodyte appeals for clemency. Stalin died while I was there, and none too soon.” He smiled. “The same day Prokofiev died. I heard there were no flowers left for his funeral.”

  9

  That Thursday Laukhin lost his temper. “For God’s sake,” he shouted at Ben in his office, “slap yourself together. What do you want me to tell them? Ben Paskow is in love? No, this time I’ll keep my word—the Tsvetayeva-bundle goes out on Monday. You’re twenty-seven years old, Ben. No more lovesick pining, no more nursing your heart’s wounds. Love and scholarship do not mix—like lox and kerosene, kaboooom!” He mimed an explosion with catastrophic consequences for Ben.

  The image of lox and kerosene was from one of his first poems, a paean to rocketry. The slim 1958 chapbook Youthful Eminences, its sheets already yellow and brittle, was somewhere in the bookshelves, among other books and magazines in which his poetry had appeared. The round grey illustration on the cover showed the stray dog Laika, wires and all, probably only hours before she was fried. He remembered hesitating before lending the collection to Helen. “My ex-wife sent it to me. Either she thought it would embarrass me or she wished to be rid of anything of mine.”