A Question of Return

by Robert Carr

  At the time, he hadn’t seen the obvious. He had been too wrapped up in his own unhappiness, and he carried on about his illness, how he’d been forced to come to the Congress at the very last moment, how, just before his departure, he’d been taken to a store in Moscow, given two shirts, a hat, and an ill-fitting suit, and then driven to the railway station. How he’d feared to refuse. How Poskrebishev himself told him, when he complained about his health, that they were at war and that he should consider himself called to serve.

  “That’s how men are, Pavel Nikolayevich, selfish, thinking only of themselves. Our sense of ourselves, our importance, is like a huge sphere always in front of our eyes, blocking out everything else. What she expected to hear from me, of course, was quite the opposite: That I’d come in spite of my illness; that I‘d left no stone unturned to be allowed to come to Paris and to see her; that I’d done all I could in order to have this meeting, a meeting of poets and, yes, lovers.”

  He went to her house and met her husband and her children. Alya was already twenty-three, a beautiful young woman with a winning smile. It was impossible not to like her. He liked Tsvetayeva’s husband too. They came to his hotel one day, Sergey and Alya, without Marina and—he realized immediately—without her knowledge. They asked him to talk her into going back to Russia. The two of them had already made up their minds to return.

  It might have been their request that stopped him from telling her the truth about the Soviet Union. But if that was the case, it did not diminish his betrayal.

  Tsvetayeva asked him about the prospects for her family in the Soviet Union, about her prospects as a poet. And he, the illustrious poet, the herald of the truth, fully aware of the terrible reality of life there, hid behind inane remarks. Instead of shaking her frail shoulders and shouting at her not to even think about returning, he told her that he couldn’t advise her. He couldn’t forgive himself now, knowing what happened to her and her family afterward.

  “It was 1935, Pavel Nikolayevich. It was after Kirov’s assassination and long after I saw with my own eyes what happened in the countryside in the early thirties. And after they shoved socialist-realism down everybody’s throat. I was already forty-five, not an easily duped, empty-headed youth. But long whiskers do not take the place of brains.”

  They went to a restaurant one day, the two of them, away from the Congress. He paid, of course—she had no money. It was not a special place, more of a bistro, but the food was plentiful and the price was right. He had enough money to take her to a nicer place, but he was saving it in order to buy a few dresses for Zinaida. Yes, foremost in his mind was that his wife’s wardrobe needed additions from Paris. He persuaded himself that Tsvetayeva would feel out of place in a nicer restaurant because of her clothes. She was famished. For some reason the waiter had to take back his first course, to replace or re-heat it, he didn’t remember anymore. After a couple of minutes, at his prodding she gave up on the civility of waiting and dug into her own meal.

  “We were all alone for three hours, and I could have told her the truth. But I kept my mouth shut, Pavel Nikolayevich. How many cuts are needed to see that we bleed? What was wrong with me that evening, what colossal folly froze my lips? Oh reason, what fools walk your paths!”

  Boris Leonidovich’s voice was trembling. He began to cough, an old man’s cough, with no cause or end.

  I told Boris Leonidovich not to get so worked up. An artist, I found myself saying, especially a poet, is rootless abroad, lacks nourishment, has less and less to write about, and, in time, withers and dies. Tsvetayeva had felt that way and that’s why she had returned.

  “Oh, what poppycock, Pasha,” he said between coughs, wiping his face with a huge handkerchief. “What drivel, romantic nonsense that works well in novels and suits poets. I know, because I often make use of this notion of the unhappiness of the exiled myself. It’s simply not always true. Didn’t she write her best poems abroad? More to the point, did she write anything after her return? Two years is a long time for a poet. But she wrote nothing after she got back to the Motherland, not one line of verse. She couldn’t find sustenance abroad, you say? Couldn’t live? Well, after two years back here, immersed in her language, surrounded by her own people, she chose death.”

  Boris Leonidovich fell silent, and I didn’t say anything for a while. It was the first time he had ever called me Pasha. Stopping a child from spurting twaddle.

  And there was more, much more self-flagellation. Tsvetayeva was harsh with him after the Congress. He must have disappointed, exasperated her. He behaved terribly toward his old parents during the trip. He avoided meeting them, pretending that he was too tired or too busy. Unthinking, or thinking too much about himself. (He never saw his parents again.) He must have felt guilty afterward, because he told Tsvetayeva he had avoided his parents. He doesn’t know if she used it as a pretext, or whether, as a mother, she found his behaviour incomprehensible, even monstrous. She let her feelings pour out in a letter she sent him a few months after the Congress. She wrote that she had found him indecisive, fickle, and selfish, as most males are. Women are less egotistical—it is their nature. If she appeared hard, she wrote, it was because it takes being hard to be unselfish. Selfish, weak people run away from everything, including their duties to parents and friends.

  “And later, when she returned, I failed her again. Soft, self-centred Boris Leonidovich ran away again. Oh, I saw her, talked and listened to her, smiled with her and hugged her. I appealed to Fadeyev and others to find work for her, and a place to live. I helped her. But I was half-hearted about it, fearful, scared. She had good reason to be disappointed in me.”

  We were outside, on the small deck off our salon. I liked looking at the river, at the solid, tranquil immensity of the water. It calmed me down, soothed me, soothed all of us, and Boris Leonidovich needed soothing at that moment. He told me the other day that people living near large bodies of water were calmer, more serene. He said that’s what Moscow needs, a large body of water, like Leningrad, as less evil would then emanate from it.

  “I shudder, Pavel Nikolayevich, I shudder when I think back. I saw her a few times, but not enough. I did everything to avoid her after her return. Everything, that is, that still allowed me to sleep at night. What masters we are, Pavel Nikolayevich, at rationalizing our weaknesses, our fears and cowardice. What masters we are at avoiding the truth about ourselves. Meyerhold’s arrest, worries about my parents, Zinaida, my work on Hamlet, the translations from Petofi, the move—I couldn’t and wouldn’t think beyond them. I kept telling myself that she chose a very inopportune time to return.”

  Tsvetayeva came to Moscow to see him once. She rarely came to Moscow during that period, before her daughter’s arrest. She was almost a prisoner in Bolshevo. She came to see him and he couldn’t wait for her to leave. She was a woman whose poetry he admired more than anyone’s else, and yet he wanted her visit to end. He was afraid of her, of her demands and criticism. He knew she saw through him. Yes, she liked his poetry, but she saw behind the façade the weak, vacillating man, hiding his flaws and his terrors. She couldn’t see the need to compromise, to hide or snivel, in order to survive.

  “Maybe afraid is the wrong word. I was overwhelmed by her, tired of her. She was too stern, too severe, too direct. And too pathetic. She came to see if I could help her find some work—translations or anything related to literature, however lightly. She read a few of her poems, and I read a few of mine. We talked about our families—I talked more, much more than she did. And all the time she stared at me with her sad, condemning eyes, expecting something more, something I was incapable of offering. In the end, I claimed I had an important meeting to attend to make her leave.”

  “Don’t do this, Boris Leonidovich. You’re being too hard on yourself.”

  “Stalin was right when he said to me, ‘You don’t know how to stand up for a comrade!’ I didn’t do much for Mandelstam either.”

  His head was down and he was looking at his fe
et, not addressing me anymore, but someone inside of him, someone who would understand and offer solace better than I could. Perhaps he was rehearsing for the final judgment.

  He had another story, and he told it in a tone both resigned and sarcastic. Literaturnaya Moskva recently approached him for recommendations for a few of Tsvetayeva’s poems to be collected in a thin volume. They came to him a month ago—Kazakevich and Paustovsky—and asked him to choose her best poetry for a collection of some fifty to sixty pages. They said he’d been her friend, and knew her poetry best. No one could choose better than him. They hastened to add, of course, that he should choose carefully, although everybody agreed that her poetry was not political.

  “Oh, how happy I was, how grateful I was to them. And for what? They were happy too, mind you, the two them, and convinced of their immense importance, of their daring. What a bunch of clowns we are. No, not clowns, starving dogs. Throw us any bone and we lick our chops and wag our tails, grateful for the flimsiest morsels that the thick-necked masters offer us.”

  We were floating past a small town. The riverbank was too far away for us to see much except grey buildings and a couple of industrial chimneys belching whitish smoke.

  Boris Leonidovich’s thoughts switched back to Tsvetayeva. “How right she was about her poetry, Pavel Nikolayevich, how prophetic she was when she wrote, ‘Scattered in bookstores, greyed by dust and time / Unseen, unsought, unopened and unsold / My poems will be savoured as are rarest wines / When they are old.’ She wrote that in 1913, when she was twenty-one.”

  10

  Laukhin spent Thursday evening reviewing the entire Tsvetayeva bundle, fixing bits here and there in the first four excerpts, and then marking paragraphs that still needed work in the largest part, the trip to Yelabuga. Reading and thinking for hours about Tsvetayeva’s life felt like being hooked to a poisonous intravenous drip—a slow infusion of pain and nausea, unseen claws squeezing his chest. He was tempted to throw it all away. He looked out the window, got up and paced the room, then went downstairs for a glass of water; poured himself vodka too and took it back upstairs with him. He laughed loudly at himself—as a native Russian and someone who had spent most of his life in the Soviet Union, he should be immunized against such tales. It wasn’t as if he didn’t know Tsvetayeva’s story, but it was the first time he had read the excerpts in sequence and in one go. Even in English, the intensity of the story stunned him. The need to concentrate on technicalities—resolving translation and selection problems—had not lessened its effect on him.

  When the telephone rang, he ran downstairs relieved by the interruption. It was Bill MacNaughton, who apologized for disturbing him at home, but wanted to make sure he wouldn’t forget they were getting together the next day. They’d have a late breakfast or an early lunch.

  “I’ll be in my office all morning, looking at numbers,” Bill said. “By numbers I mean budgets and funding, and that’s where the dean believes you could do more for us. For the entire faculty, not just our department. And he’s not alone in thinking that. Your name, you know—there’re rumours of the Nobel Prize. The dean wants you to spread your wings, cover others with the shade of your fame.”

  “That’s quite dreadful, Bill.”

  “I know. What was I saying? Yes, help other departments as well. I know it’s not the best time now, you being so busy with the first volume, but … you see, I promised the dean I’d talk to you.”

  Laukhin told Bill he’d pass by his office the next day. “Noonish,” he added. “I have to pick up something from my office.” He expected Bill to hang up, but he didn’t. He cleared his throat. “There’s something else, Art.”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m not sure how to say it. It’s not good, Art, not good at all, to attack people so fiercely. Words spread like an oil slick, and you never know who’ll be contaminated and develop a grudge. And then, when you ask for support … It’s not wise, Art.”

  “What are you talking about, Bill?”

  “Your attack on Zladsky.”

  “What?”

  “I read your interview in the Paris Review.”

  “Ah.”

  “Zladsky has many admirers and friends.”

  “You’re not asking me to scrounge money from south of the border, are you?”

  “We do receive, of course, endowments from Canadians living there. And, well, yes, even Americans, some who have studied here.”

  “Fuck Zladsky, Bill.”

  “Sorry?”

  “You heard me.”

  “And Solzhenitsyn, now—”

  “I didn’t attack Solzhenitsyn—don’t invent things.”

  “Not directly.”

  “Not even indirectly.”

  “The people who gave him the Nobel Prize are still alive and influential. They might even still be on the committee that awards the prize for literature. Why antagonize them? You’re not helping yourself.”

  “My words about Solzhenitsyn were respectful and restrained.”

  “We’ll talk about it tomorrow.”

  “Not if you want me there.”

  “Well, I’ll see you tomorrow, then. Try to be sensible.”

  Sensible. He was as sensible as he could be. He’d been cautious about Solzhenitsyn, even guarded, in the interview. The Emslies had got the same impression as Bill MacNaughton, though. This sensitivity about Solzhenitsyn likely started with Colson, who had read the sarcasm and dislike in what he’d said to Erika Belov-Wang. And Colson would have mentioned his impressions to Bill—collegial amusement over a cup of tea.

  * * *

  His visit to Vermont had only confirmed what he had always felt about Solzhenitsyn. He had met him a few times in Moscow—the first time at the Sovremennik Theatre a month after the publication of Ivan Denisovich. He couldn’t remember how he and Tanya ended up celebrating that New Year with the actors and actresses of the theatre, nor if Reshetovskaya, Solzhenitsyn’s first wife, had been there with the suddenly famous author. But he recalled how Solzhenitsyn had ogled the lightly clad actresses with both disapproval and want. He ogled Tanya too. The Laukhins arrived late—was it already 1963?—and there were too many people, and too much cheer and noise and energetic shaking for proper introductions. They found Kyril there, inebriated and loud, and he invited Tanya to dance with him when he saw them, helping her out of her winter coat and handing it to Laukhin, and then dragging her away. Afterward some young actor butted in and danced with Tanya, and when they were done Tanya came back to where Laukhin was chatting with Kyril and whispered, “That old man couldn’t take his eyes off my boobs. I don’t mind, but why the sour face?” They followed Tanya’s gaze, and Kyril said, “That’s Solzhenitsyn.”

  He remembered how irritated he came away from his trip to Vermont with Fedya. Did he really expect advice on where and how best to settle? Fedya Malgunov told Laukhin that Solzhenitsyn and Svetlova had thoroughly researched that topic in a cross-continent trek three years earlier, during the summer of 1975. It was Fedya who talked him into the trip to Vermont.

  At the car rental agency, soon after they landed, Fedya handed him a map and began rattling off numbers and exotic names. “It’s the 93 from Boston, and the 89 shortly before Concord. After Lebanon we drive back south on the 91 for a short distance, and then it’s the 131 all the way, or almost. The 131 is not a freeway, but there won’t be too much traffic. It’s not complicated, Tyoma. Trickier after Cavendish, as the house—well, the estate—is a few miles past it. I think I remember the way, though.”

  “I can’t read maps, Fedya.”

  “Start learning.”

  On the drive from the airport, Laukhin asked Fedya how well he knew Solzhenitsyn.

  “I did a few things for him. And with him. Still do.”

  “Like what?”

  “I love driving these big American boats. Superb capitalist excesses. What did I do? I played tennis with him at Stanford, among other things. He loves tennis, and he’s awful at it.”

&
nbsp; “What else?”

  “A bit of research now and then. I drop in at the Hoover Library or at some other California institution for him. No point in having him fly so far for some minor details or double-checking. You can’t talk about this, Tyoma.”

  “About you helping Solzhenitsyn?”

  “About this visit.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m not sure—perhaps to avoid setting a precedent. Aleksander Isayevich seldom agrees to visits.” He chuckled, and shook his head. “Well, he won’t be happy.”

  “What?”

  “It’s too early. He sees most people in the evening, after he’s finished work for the day.”

  “Oh, fuck it, Fedya. Let’s turn around.”

  “No, no, Tyoma, humour me. I need the money, need it badly.”

  He had agreed to the visit for Fedya’s sake, couldn’t say no to him. His friend had had an assignment from a magazine, an article on Solzhenitsyn provided he could find something new, or, at least, a new angle. Laukhin’s arrival on the continent offered him the chance of a fresh visit with the Vermont recluse. A fresh perspective too, witnessing two artists’ first meeting and their intercourse. “Two giants of literature, Tyoma,” he had said to him grinning in the airplane, “you, the younger one, the poet, and Solzhnitsyn, the older one, the great narrator, the sage. Who knows, there may even be a clash. After all, Tyoma, he could hold a dim view of your rather privileged life. I’ll just sit there, listen, and make notes, mental notes, of course.”

  The morning was grey. Laukhin kept the map on his lap, and, for a while, as they drove through the nondescript suburbs with innumerable billboards, gas-stations, and shops, he tried to make sense of the numbers Fedya had recited earlier and the yellow highlight marking the route on the map. It wasn’t a short drive. He dozed off, exhausted by nights with little sleep, the stress of so many new things, the curiosity and harassment of the press. In his half-sleep it dawned on him that he had agreed to visit Solzhenitsyn because he hoped to get some respite from the incessant demands on his time and opinions. When he looked about him again, they were driving on a winding road. There were mountains or hills not far away, their flanks wooded. The snow on the sides of the road were thick for long stretches. Fedya was wearing sunglasses. Laukhin realized he’d slept for quite a while because he felt invigorated, but it could have been the shining sun and unexpectedly clear sky. When Fedya stopped the car on the side of the road to relieve himself, Laukhin climbed out too and filled his lungs with fresh air and the smell of spring.