A Question of Return

by Robert Carr

  “I’ll be all right,” Ben said.

  Laukhin rolled his eyes. His best student was like a helpless animal, a puppy that couldn’t hold it in and did it in the house. He walked to the window and stood there with his back to Ben.

  “I need you all right now,” he said. “You just told me you couldn’t do anything this week. You haven’t done much in weeks and the deadline is October, only two months from now. There can be no more delays. I had another call this morning from the New Yorker, not a happy one. We’ve got to finish the bundle this weekend. You’ve done the entry of the morning at the hotel, haven’t you?”

  “I’ve started it.”

  “It’s not a long entry. Finish it and then do the train trip back to Moscow, quite short too. I’ll be here, in my office, tomorrow at noon, to pick up your work. I’ll spend the weekend at home and do nothing else but revise and correct the whole bundle.”

  “The last seven excerpts need to be typed in.”

  “A secretary will type them on Monday and we’ll review everything.”

  Ben mumbled his consent. Still facing the window Laukhin took a deep, noisy breath and then turned and changed tack—after all, fools needed a gentle touch.

  “Ben, Benya, Benchik, you are the only one who can convey the drama, the pall of daily misery, trivia and terror, the need to weigh every word, even among friends, and yet the need to talk, to find a kindred soul, to gossip. I can’t figure out how and why, but you get it. It must be the air in Corby Falls. Or compensation for your atrocious accent. Helen is preoccupied with the coming baby. And Paul, well, Paul could help, but he’s often careless, or drunk, and we’d have to go over his work. It’s too late now, anyway, for anyone else.”

  He walked back to his desk. “You can do it, Ben. We can do it. They’re mad, threatening to sue—as if art can be done to deadline. One last heroic exertion, Ben, and then I’ll return to that blasted introduction. If I don’t send it with the proofs, it will be included only in the second edition, if there is a second edition. Ben, are you listening?”

  Chastised, Ben nodded and walked slowly out of his office.

  The interview in Tuesday’s Globe and Mail (it had appeared simultaneously in the New York Times) had added to the pressure he felt. Bart had insisted on it. It was good publicity, no doubt, but it also tightened the vice one more turn. Laukhin told the interviewer that by late October or early November the first volume of the journals would be in bookstores, in time for Christmas sales. He said he was certain this time. He had the galley proofs and was working day and night on the final corrections. It had been promised long before now, he agreed, but this time it would be out. He couldn’t help it, he was a perfectionist. Poets are uncompromising, it’s their nature, but he was confident that the readers of his father’s journal would think it well worth the wait and painstaking effort—his and his students’. Yes, the journal was wonderful, and readers would get another early taste of it when excerpts, all related to the Russian poet Marina Tsvetayeva, appeared in the New Yorker in October. Globe readers would see the Tsvetayeva bundle as well, in several Saturday issues. The excerpts contained his father’s recollections about Tsvetayeva, about how terribly she was treated upon her return to the Soviet Union, including by many of her fellow writers and poets. Yes, there would be a few surprises, especially about the end of her life, in Yelabuga. Nothing earth-shattering, of course, after all Tsvetayeva was only a poet, not a movie star or a politician, but they would shock some people. And fascinate others.

  * * *

  He’d go home and chain himself to his desk for the next three days. He had to be back at Alumni Hall on Friday, briefly, to pick up Ben’s final translations, but that was it, he had no other commitments. It would be a long working weekend, with a lot of coffee and minimal food.

  No, it wouldn’t be that bad. A secretary would type in the remaining excerpts—both his and Ben’s handwriting was legible—and he’d borrow Bill MacNaughton’s secretary for a few hours as well; the chair of the department was supposed to help too, not just administer.

  He’d have time to catch a glimpse of Audrey at the gallery later on that day, have a word or two with her. “I do hope you will come,” that’s what she wrote in her note, thanking him for the flowers. She made a special point of inviting him. He’d go late, toward the end of the vernissage, after some serious, solid, sustained work on the bundle.

  What had he said to Ben—love and scholarship do not mix? What a bolshoe porky! Such hypocrisy from someone who had subjected the sleepy Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures to not one but several romantic upheavals. While negotiating with the university, he had gone to meetings with Lydia, who never said much, just smiled and smoked, and now and then applied a new layer of lipstick. He claimed he needed her there because he was unused to Western ways. In time, everybody got used to her harmless and vague ways, and she became the object of mild admiration for putting up with him and for her effective handling of him when he got drunk and obstreperous. And then, a few years later, he dumped Lydia, and Ewa Kucharsky, a student in their department, moved in with him. At least Ewa was not his student. She was twenty-eight, married, and close to finishing her Ph.D. in Polish Literature. Her husband, also a scholar, had returned to Poland unable to find a job in Canada. Laukhin’s affair with Ewa lasted six months—it started in November 1981, and the department got wind of it sometime in April the following year. The scholar had returned and wanted his wife back. When Ewa demurred, he threw a brick through Laukhin’s windows two nights in a row. The third night, Laukhin and Efim took turns guarding the house, but nothing happened. The real storm broke the next day when Ewa’s husband went to Alumni Hall and complained to chair Bill MacNaughton. It was a surprise, as Laukhin and Ewa had managed to keep their affair secret, but there was more and worse. Her husband claimed that Laukhin was helping Ewa—writing entire chapters of her thesis. Because her thesis was about contemporary Polish poetry, the complaint was heard and there were awkward moments for the department. Olga Tamanova raised the issue at a department meeting—the propriety of an affair with a graduate student. Either academic impropriety or an abuse of power (or both) were happening right under their noses. Laukhin turned red and loud. He punched the table, shouting that he’d never discussed Ewa’s thesis with her (a lie, he had). He claimed passion, the primacy of love, and that he, for one, was not going to live without it. There were embarrassed looks around the table, then Colson Emslie cleared his throat, said that they needed to be pragmatic about the whole thing. He made several points: that Ewa Kucharsky was an exceptional student who needed no help from Laukhin; that Laukhin had never taught Ewa Kucharsky or ever interfered in her favour; that, finally, all they needed to do was to ensure that neither Laukhin nor any of his close friends, and Colson included himself, would be among those examining Ewa Kucharsky’s thesis. There were several dissenting voices, and arguments broke out again, but after surveying the scene for several minutes and trying to introduce some order, MacNaughton moved adroitly to postpone the discussion. He coughed and hemmed and said that he would review the guidelines—if there were any—for such an unusual and delicate situation. In the corridor afterward, after Laukhin left, still furious, his colleagues shrugged their shoulders and mumbled, “Well, he’s a poet. A Russian poet. Of course.” They didn’t say as much, but they all thought that poets could be forgiven such bursts of passion, such blindness, such disregard for the rules. That’s what Colson told Laukhin the next day. In the end, Laukhin was too important for the department and for the university, and pragmatism prevailed. Because a co-supervisor of her thesis was at the time at the University of Illinois, Chicago, Ewa moved there in the summer of 1982 and completed her doctorate in early 1983. She was offered a position there and she accepted it.

  He had not seen Ewa since February. Her visit then had been a melancholy, vaguely tender goodbye. She’d been there when Erika Belov-Wang came to the house for the first day of the interview. When he got
home the following day—the day young Erika fucked him in his office—Ewa had asked how the second day of the interview had gone. After he mumbled it had been all right but he needed to see the transcripts, she told him she was pregnant.

  “Mine?” Laukhin asked.

  She laughed. “Now, that’s silly.”

  There was something familiar in all this, and he recalled Tanya—Ewa called her “wife number one,” as if there had been others since—telling him she was pregnant with Vadim’s child.

  “Are you keeping the child?”

  She nodded. “I’ll probably get married.”

  “You divorced only last year.”

  “It took a long time.”

  “Aren’t you rushing?”

  “I’m thirty-two. No more quick trips to Toronto, Art.”

  “You have somebody lined up?”

  “The father.”

  He knew that Ewa was seeing somebody in Chicago, a colleague of hers who taught Polish and Russian history, and yet for a second, hearing she was pregnant, he thought the child might be his. Of course, it couldn’t have been. It had been five months since he last saw her.

  * * *

  He gathered all of the Tsvetayeva material in a green folder, switched off the desk lamp, and ran down the stairs with fake energy. The bright light outside blinded him. He was in a bad mood, and thought a walk might help. He rounded Queen’s Park, turned west and walked slowly along Hoskin Avenue, turned north on Devonshire and then east on Bloor. On the stairs of the crumbling Royal Conservatory a shameless pair were all over each other.

  The Yonge subway was crowded, and he got out at Eglinton, although the Lawrence station was closer to his house. Walking slowly from the subway station, he thought of Audrey.

  Ivor Bendikson was back at his battle against growth. That was what retired people did on this continent—mowed their lawns, and when they couldn’t do it anymore, they lay down and died. At least, his next two days would be quiet. Ivor stopped the engine. “A couple of people were looking at your house this morning,” he said.

  “Oh?”

  “They were in a car across the street.”

  As always, Ivor made Laukhin pry the vital information from him.

  “And?”

  “They looked Russian.”

  “Really.”

  Ivor nodded.

  It had been a long day, and this was its first amusing moment. “In what way?”

  “Well, you know …”

  “How many Russians have you met, Ivor, beside me? In your entire life? Movies don’t count.”

  “Many.”

  “Oh. Where? When?”

  “In 1945—”

  “None since?”

  “What? I met you, of course. Yes, in 1945 I was twenty-two years old, and in a US Army uniform. There was an improvised get together in a German village, a day or two after the end of the war, and, I remember it well, a lot of drinking. The officers on both sides were uneasy, and very few could speak the others’ language. There were two Russian women, one young and pretty. She had huge boots.”

  “Huge boots,” Laukhin said after a while.

  “Yes.”

  “Is there more?”

  “I didn’t like their faces.”

  “Whose faces?”

  “Those two, across the street.”

  “Russian faces.”

  “Yes. One of them got out of the car and walked up and down the street a couple of times.”

  “Was one of them big?”

  “Big?”

  “Yes, big and tall. Very tall.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe the one that didn’t get out of the car. The one who did wasn’t particularly tall.”

  “It’s all right, Ivor, I know what it was all about.”

  Efim had called a few weeks ago to warn him that he was planning to tear down the house and build a new one. “You don’t have to move yet,” Efim shouted on the phone. “Not before the new year. It’ll be a fancy house, because that is a fancy area. I have a fancy architect, of course. I hate fancy architects, Tyoma. I said, OK, where are the drawings? No, the fancy architect first has to see the place. I said, I know the dimensions, I’ll tell you the dimensions of the lot. No, the fancy architect has to see the street. I said, OK, drive there, look for a while, drive back, what’s the big deal? No, he has to take pictures, then look at them, let the whole thing sink in. Sink in, I liked that. Every day of ‘sink-in’ costs me money. It’s an entire process, Tyoma, a process which can’t be rushed. Ha!”

  “Did they take pictures?” Laukhin asked Ivor.

  “I don’t know. I stopped watching them after a while.”

  Among the junk mail he found a couple of bills and a letter from his sister. Larissa rarely wrote to him, once a year perhaps, and her letters were short and said little. But this time the envelope seemed to have more heft. He took the letter upstairs. The bed was a mess, the way he had left it in his morning rush. An image of Audrey and himself all over each other near the unmade bed surged in his mind. They blundered about trying to dispose of their clothes, she as awkward as he, an amused and sly smile on her lips.

  He pushed the books and other papers to a corner of the worktable to make room for the folder with the Tsvetayeva bundle. There, ready to be opened and worked on after he had a shower, likely the first of many that weekend. He undressed, wrapped himself in a fresh towel, and sauntered across the landing to the bathroom. He had got used to the size of his bedroom-study, but the vastness of the bathroom still made him uncomfortable.

  Back in the bedroom, he sat down to read his sister’s letter. She had separated from her husband and would be divorcing him. (There was a hint, at the beginning of the letter, of a new man in her life, but nothing else about him). Laukhin was surprised. Larissa was forty-five, and her marriage had seemed solid. But what did he know? She had married and moved to Leningrad, and they’d grown apart. The distance hadn’t helped, and he never got along with his brother-in-law. In Toronto, Laukhin had blamed him for his sister’s letters being so short and impersonal. Maybe his troubles with Tanya had contributed to his estrangement from Larissa, because the two of them had always been close.

  She wrote that she was staying with Tanya in Peredelkino for a couple of weeks, a needed change of scenery and people. It had been years since she’d been in the Laukhins’ old dacha, and she felt melancholy that Moscow was encroaching on the village. That was what struck her most after so many years.

  … I’m writing just after lunch. I like my room, my old room—remember it? It seems much smaller now, but it has all I need. I have pushed the table to the window, and I spend much of my time writing letters and looking out the window. The summer light cheers my heart. I have the best view in the world, especially if I lean over the table a bit. This morning I took a long walk. I ended up in Izmalkovo and sat staring at the lake for an hour or so.

  I saw Tanya and Vadim and little Mitya, when I arrived. They left yesterday, but Tanya and Mitya will be back next week. They are all fine. Mitya is tall for a seven year old boy. He looks very much like Tanya, but I can see some of his father in him. Oh, Tyoma, Tyoma …

  Tanya is beside herself about my decision, but she’ll get used to it. Vadim laughs. Why now, you’ll ask. Because I’m done with him. I said the same thing to Tanya, who replied, “Is that your answer, ‘I’m done with him’?”

  Well, there is no changing my mind about it. I’ve never been happier. Contented, finally at ease with myself.

  I’m learning English. Perhaps, one day, I’ll visit you …

  He sighed. Clearly, Larissa still believed that Mitya was her nephew. Amazing strength from Tanya to hide the truth from her friend for so long. Mitya certainly grew up never doubting Vadim was his father. His parents probably told everybody to hide “the truth” from him. A necessary lie everybody gravely agreed to, for the good of the young boy. But not a lie.

  * * *

  The call was from Viktor Zhelenin, the publisher a
nd editor of Sintesy. He looked at his watch—it would be 10:30 p.m. in Paris.

  Sintesy had published a few of his poems in the past, and, like a fool, Laukhin had promised Zhelenin to send some of his new poetry to him. It didn’t pay much, but none of the Russian journals in the West did. Laukhin had not known at the time that he’d almost stop writing poetry. He had made this rash promise during a visit to the Sintesy office—in a former garage in the Paris suburb of Fontenay-aux-Roses—shortly after his defection, when he was still wondering where to settle down. Soon after that Zhelenin began demanding the promised poems and wouldn’t believe it when Laukhin told him he had nothing to offer. In letters and, lately, phone calls, Zhelenin ranted about broken promises and ingratitude, although Laukhin never understood where ingratitude came in, unless it was for the delicious meal at a local restaurant Zhelenin paid for the day Laukhin visited.

  Laukhin remembered the dinner well. Zhelenin’s wife, Miriam Emmanuilovna, had been there too, a short, vivacious woman, with a good appetite. Andrey Aksakov was visiting with a writers’ delegation from Moscow, and—a last minute arrangement—had travelled from Paris to see Laukhin. There had been a lot of eating and drinking that evening, especially by Aksakov, who was returning to Moscow the following day. When Laukhin mentioned that Aksakov might join them, Zhelenin had said, in his booming voice, “Of course, bring your friend along. I think Miriam met him many years ago,” but later that evening, he noticed an exchange of glances between the Zhelenins when Aksakov ordered his fourth or fifth cognac.

  It had been very warm in the restaurant. Zhelenin held forth throughout the evening, both amused and unhappy. “They loved us when we got here, all of them, the entire émigré community. We were invited everywhere and barely had an evening to ourselves. We were a novelty as so few left the Soviet Union in the fifties, and hardly anyone who’d been in a forced-labour camp. One old man even said to me that they were all very fond of us, both of us, even though Miriam Emmanuilovna was Jewish. You remember Trebukhin, don’t you Miriam? Old man, short, no hair, always wore a green corduroy jacket. Yes, he said that. But they didn’t like Sintesy. Not much at the beginning, and not at all later. They called me confused at first, ill-advised, then naïve and stubborn. When I argued that a humane socialism was not impossible, they called me an unwitting supporter of Communism, then a dodgy imbecile, a traitor to Russia, a Judas. We don’t exist for them anymore, Miriam and I. Veche published an article claiming I was seven-eighths Jewish. Between us, I’m one-eighth only, not that it matters. Russkaya Misl was classier. Their research showed that I was only half-Jewish, but that the other half was mostly Polish. My ethnic make-up, they added generously, didn’t make me a bad person, only incapable of understanding Russia’s mystic soul and destiny. The new boys, Maximov and his cohort at Kontinent, are too clever for this. They simply dismiss me as a popuchik—a fellow traveller.”