A Question of Return

by Robert Carr

  “It’s a thought.”

  He didn’t expect her to agree, and her noncommittal answer confused him. It was only moments later, when she asked, softly, “Shouldn’t we get going?” that he realized what was happening.

  It was well past midnight. They hailed a cab and sat side by side during the ride without speaking, without touching. He was paralyzed by the fear of saying or doing something that would make her change her mind. He consoled himself with the thought that it was hard to be both in love and witty. All he could think of was that in half an hour they’d be naked and holding each other. That very day he had told Ben to slap himself together. An odd expression, he’d realized the moment it came out of his mouth, but that’s exactly what he needed to do right now.

  In the kitchen, Laukhin put his recompense in the fridge. He had enough cheese for the rest of his stay on earth.

  “Jean Lezzard was in a foul mood tonight,” he told Audrey. “I think he was ready to strangle the artist, or the husband. Especially the husband. The dog got on his nerves too. Why did he do it, if it distressed him so much?”

  “Oh, it wasn’t the show, or not only the show. Howard Lear is paying through his nose, believe me. No, it’s something else that has been bugging him for a couple of days.”

  She told Laukhin that Lezzard had been in a foul mood since reading the interview with Laukhin in the Globe. He read it on Tuesday morning, just before she arrived at the gallery to help organize the new show. He’d mentioned it to her, cursing as he did, but she thought he’d just been venting his frustration about the upcoming vernissage. When he got up to welcome Marga Lear, who had dropped in to inspect the installation, Audrey picked up the newspaper from his desk and read the interview. She read it carefully, twice, because she knew from Laukhin that he was preparing the material on Tsvetayeva. He had included the right hooks to interest readers: “An early taste of Pavel Laukhin’s memoirs for the readers … Famous and tragic Russian poet … Compelling recollections about Marina Tsvetayeva … The surprising and shocking end of her life, in Yelabuga, a small sleepy town on the Kama River …”

  It was Yelabuga that stuck in her mind. Despite Laukhin’s ominous words about the town in the interview, she thought the name enchanting, a reminder, although she didn’t understand why, of bearded sorcerers, talking heads, and witches.

  They were still in the kitchen, and Laukhin wasn’t sure what to do next. He had the age and wisdom of trees, but felt clumsy and awkward. He opened the bottle of wine and took two glasses from the cupboard. He handed her the glasses and stared at her speechless, both because he couldn’t keep his eyes off her, and because it is in moments of impasse that goddesses spring to help.

  “Shouldn’t we go upstairs?” Audrey said. “We can’t spend the night in the kitchen.”

  They went upstairs, Laukhin carrying the bottle of wine.

  She was surprised by the size of the bedroom. “I thought only Martha had such a large bedroom.”

  “It’s where I work too,” Laukhin said, pointing at his worktable. “The last owner was probably a playboy. He needed only a bedroom and bathroom. There used to be a mirror on the ceiling, according to Efim.”

  “Efim?”

  “The current owner, an old friend. I rent the house from him. Rent is the wrong word, since I hardly pay any. ”

  He excused himself and went into the bathroom. Looking in the mirror, he realized he still had the bottle of wine with him. He picked up a towel from the floor and hung it on a hook. There was a strand of his hair in the sink, and he flushed it down. He should have a cleaning woman more often. He washed his hands and went back.

  Audrey had put the glasses on the night table. He placed the bottle of wine on the floor nearby. She said, “I don’t think we’ll need it.”

  When he touched her—her shoulders, rather clumsily—she was shivering. “It’s been a while, you know,” she murmured.

  “That’s my line. Anyway, it’s like bicycling. ”

  She chuckled. “Oh, I hope it isn’t. Switch off the light, Art.”

  “I want to see you.”

  “You’ll feel me.”

  He could barely breathe as he switched off the light. Her lips were soft and cool, and her tongue moved slowly, tantalizingly slowly. She stopped and whispered, “There is enough street light to see our way through.”

  She was quicker than him, because—and he sensed it more with his hands that with his eyes—she had dropped her skirt and squeezed out of her blouse while he only managed to kick off his shoes. He sat down on his bed and, without letting go of her, he bent and buried his face in her soft skin, whispering mute words of thanks. She must have freed her breasts because he felt them on his forehead, and he moved his face and, straightening up a bit, began to kiss them gently, and feel them and nuzzle them with his nose and his mouth and his lips and his tongue, one and then the other. He felt her hands caressing his head and neck. He must have forgotten himself, because he heard her say, softly, “Art?”

  “Yes?”

  “This is very nice, but there is more of me, you know.”

  “Sorry.”

  “And, Art?”

  “Yes?”

  “Is it hard for you to undress in the dark?”

  “It’s just …”

  She bent towards him and whispered in his ear, “You need help?”

  Wed, 12 October 1955

  I’m up as usual before dawn and, as I do most days, writing in my notebook. I wonder again whether I’d have taken to keeping a journal if I were able to sleep in the early hours of the morning. I’m addicted now, like a smoker who lights a cigarette when his eyes first open on a new day.

  We were up late last night again, talking and emptying the bottle of cognac Korotkov sent in the afternoon. Arkhip brought it to us, but by the way he looked at Boris Leonidovich, I wondered whether Korotkova and not the Captain had arranged its delivery. Neither of them was at dinner last evening. We were told that Korotkova was not feeling well, while the Captain was detained by some minor emergency in the engine room, nothing we need worry about. (Can an emergency be minor?)

  Toward midnight, while talking about Tsvetayeva’s first days back in the country, and the shock Bolshevo must have been to her, Boris Leonidovich mentioned Efron.

  I said, “Poor Sergey Efron. He returns to Russia, thinking his duty to the Motherland is done, and then, two years later, slam-bam, in the dungeon and gone.”

  Boris Leonidovich became agitated. “It’s terrible, of course, the way he disappeared, and particularly terrible for his family, but he was not an innocent victim, unlike so many others. He became an agent for the NKVD while he was in the West, in Paris. It was Efron who recruited the Klepinins for the NKVD, and he probably recruited others. From the late twenties—for almost ten years, Pavel Nikolayevich—he was a secret agent, a razvedchik. Ten years of duplicity and betrayal! He was involved in the death of opponents of the Soviet state living in the West. The French police were on his trail after the last operation he was involved in, the killing of the communist defector Ignace Reiss in Switzerland. The NKVD smuggled Efron out of France and into the Soviet Union in October 1937, afraid the French police were getting close to him. They had no choice but to get Efron away. But they didn’t want the West to learn of it, hence the hideaway at Bolshevo, and all the secrecy, and the new name they gave him.”

  He stared at me and, as I didn’t say anything, he added, “To make matters worse for Tsvetayeva, their daughter, Alya, had already returned to the Soviet Union in the spring.”

  “Why did they do it, Boris Leonidovich? Why did they arrest him two years after he was taken back to Russia and then shoot him?”

  “I don’t know. Nobody knows and we’ll probably never know. Those were insane, barbarous times. To ensure his silence? Was he seen as a liability and a potential embarrassment if his existence in Russia under another name was discovered? Probably, but will we ever know for sure?” He paused and then added, “Sometimes I think
it was the punishment God prepared for him, for all he’d done. But it can’t be, because his wife and his daughter were punished too.”

  He stood up and began to pace. He went on talking about Sergey Efron, hardly pausing for breath, and it was obvious that he had thought many times about what he was telling me. He didn’t know, and likely would never know, whether Efron directly participated in actual killings, or just in their organization and logistics. It didn’t matter, though. Efron had spied on his friends and betrayed them to the NKVD. He betrayed his former White Russian comrades, refugees like him, barely tolerated and barely surviving in foreign lands. Forgotten, wasting, useless people, hungry most of the time, who would write now and then an article in the émigré press, which nobody read, and in which the Soviet Union was taken to task. Wretched, uprooted souls who talked disapprovingly about the sorry fate of Russia in smoky cafés, drinking cheap wine and weak tea. He betrayed them, his friends, his comrades in exile and in penury. He, Boris Leonidovich, could understand changing one’s mind and falling in love with the Communist regime. But he could not understand spying on and betraying your friends. He couldn’t think of anything more despicable.

  “But then our entire regime is based on this, Pavel Nikolayevich. It’s a disease in our country, an epidemic, this ability of ours to betray our friends and neighbours.” With a sneer he added, “Relatives too, even our immediate families. And Efron was a willing carrier of the disease.”

  I remembered Sasha Cornilov’s words on the stairs of our building, while his huge body pinned me against the wall. I said, “Cornilov told me something like this at the time Tsvetayeva stayed in our apartment for a few days. I didn’t believe him. I thought it was his way of getting at me, of showing me how stupid and naïve I was. He almost pushed me down the stairs, that’s how mad he was about what I was making Varya do.”

  And, after a while, he whispered, “Alya worked for them too …”

  “Alya Efron? She worked for the NKVD?”

  “She did. I’m not sure what she did for them, probably not much, but she did.”

  “Good God. Did you learn this from her mother as well?”

  “No. I don’t think she ever knew or even suspected it. I know this from Alya herself. Today she speaks highly of her father and of his activities, in which she might have been involved. She didn’t confess it openly, but I understood it from the stories she told after her return from camp and exile. She adored her father.”

  I opened the door to our small deck and stepped out in the cold air. There were a few pale lights to the west, slowly dimming. Boris Leonidovich followed me. He said Tsvetayeva had been the only innocent one in her family. She and her young son, of course. I said, “I’m sure it was a relief to the authorities that Tsvetayeva killed herself. One less person in the know about murders abroad on behalf of the Soviet regime.”

  It was getting late. I lit a cigarette. For some reason—related to the minor emergency?—the engines had stopped and we were drifting, slowly. The river was very wide in this spot. There were clouds above us because I could see only a few stars. We were like a ghost ship, a few lights gliding silently on the dark waters. A ship bearing the ghosts of Tsvetayeva, and Efron, and so many others.

  It was cold and I thought of going back to our salon and then to my cabin. Reading my mind, Boris Leonidovich said, “Don’t go in yet, please. Keep me company for a few more minutes. I wish I could smoke again. I wish I could cry too, but there are no more tears. And it’s not just me. The whole country has no tears left. Monstrous mutations have happened to us, in a couple of generations. Plugged tear-ducts. The survival of the scoundrels. In our country, the scoundrels have become the fittest. Compassion has been selected out of our genes.”

  I didn’t say anything for a long time. I had no answer. Then I muttered, “We survived, Boris Leonidovich. What does this say about us?”

  He snorted. “Exactly.”

  I said, “Let’s go in and try to get some sleep.”

  “She heard nothing from or about her husband. Not one letter, not one official word. He was shot at the end of ‘41, after her death. The first news from Alya arrived in the spring of ‘41. A letter from a camp in Komi. A year and a half without news from your child, a child taken away while you watched. When she killed herself, everybody who mattered to her, except for her son, was in prison—her daughter, her sister, her husband. What kind of country is this, Pavel Nikolayevich? What other countries do you know where things like this happen? No sister, no daughter, no husband—and no friends either, because they were all afraid to help her, frightened that they’d end up like her family. I was frightened.”

  11

  When Laukhin woke up in the morning, Audrey, already dressed, was sitting at the table by the window reading the Tsvetayeva material he had been working on. He propped himself on his elbow and watched her for a while. She sensed he was awake because she lifted her hand and, without turning, wiggled her fingers—a silent greeting.

  “How long have you been up?” he asked.

  She half-turned to him. “Two hours or so. I couldn’t sleep, my mind was racing. Too many things happened yesterday. I sat down at your desk, and here, in the poet’s own chair, I had a moment of madness and thought of writing a poem. But then I saw this,” she waved the papers she held in her hand, “and sanity returned.”

  “What do you think of it?”

  “Heartbreaking. Such terrible times, yet I’m gripped, mesmerized. Poor woman.”

  “I mean, is it a good read? Would you buy Pavel Laukhin’s journals after reading that much?”

  “It’s more than a good read—I can’t put it down. This is my second time reading it. But I’m biased. I’ve heard a lot about Pavel Laukhin’s journal and about Tsvetayeva the last three or four months. And I was reminded of Tsvetayeva only the other day by your interview in the Globe and Mail.”

  “So it worked. I was pushed into doing the interview by my agent, and you’re the proof it worked.”

  “Are these the soon-to-be-famous Tsvetayeva excerpts?

  “Yes. There’s more work to be done, but it’s all there, in the green folder. I’m revising the last part, the trip to Yelabuga. That’s what I’ll be doing this weekend, chained to my desk. Monday morning I’ll do a final review of the entire bundle, and have a secretary type it. It’s got to go out by Monday evening. Buy the first October issue of the New Yorker, Audrey. It will all be in there.”

  She went back to reading the excerpts. He looked at his watch—a few minutes past seven. He was disappointed he hadn’t woken up with her, naked beside him in his bed. He’d have liked to watch her sleep. He asked her why she was already dressed, but she didn’t hear him, and she seemed startled when he repeated his question in a louder voice. She told him she had to leave soon—to get back to the gallery and let the cleaning crew in—and wondered whether he could make her a cup of tea. Of course, tea—one thing that the English and the Russians had in common.

  He got dressed and shuffled to the bathroom. Downstairs in the kitchen, he rummaged through a cupboard, finding Japanese green tea, celestial offerings from Bengal, a tisane (some French herb), exquisite dark Darjeeling, a tea with a smoky whiff and unpronounceable Chinese name, a box of tea bags—all Ewa’s purchases.

  When he returned, Audrey was still there, at the table, holding the green folder on her lap, and looking out the window. He listed for her all the choices she had.

  She nodded, absently, “Black tea, please. With milk.”

  “So English.”

  He boiled water and made the tea. He went back up, removed the green folder from Audrey’s lap, gently helped her up, and steered her, as if she were blind, out of the room.

  In the kitchen, sitting down at the small table, Audrey smiled and said, “I’m at my worst in the morning.”

  “Have you slept at all?”

  “A couple of hours. I watched you for a while, but then you turned the other way.”

  Her hair was
tussled in places, although attempts had been made towards a perfunctory order. There were minor traces of last night’s makeup on her face.

  “I saw that older Russian man again, Mr. Gratch,” she said. “He was walking back and forth in front of the gallery Wednesday afternoon.”

  “Did he go in? Did he have another fight with Lezzard?”

  “I don’t know. I was sent on an errand by Lezzard, and he was there, pacing, as if he was waiting for somebody. He didn’t recognize me, or didn’t see me. He wasn’t there when I got back an hour later. Maybe he did go in while I was away, but Lezzard didn’t seem disturbed when I came back.”

  “Well, the painting which troubled him is not there anymore.”

  “I took pictures, you know.”

  “You did what?”

  “The day the two Russians came in July, I closed the gallery, went out and bought a Polaroid camera, went back and took pictures of the large Chemakoff oil. Of the room too—I took pictures of the room with the painting in it.”

  “What on earth possessed you to do that? What did you have in mind?”

  “I don’t know … I thought it might come in handy.”

  “Handy for what?”

  “No idea. Maybe we should tell the police that Lezzard is trafficking in confiscated art.”

  “You didn’t tell me you took pictures.”

  “I didn’t want you to laugh at me.”

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea to tell the police.”

  “Ah, the Russians’ fear of the police.”

  “Yes, it’s that, but it’s more than that. Say we tell the police, and they grab Lezzard. I doubt they’ll be able to prove anything, even with your photographs, but assume they do. The gallery closes as a result and Josiane loses her job. And other artists have one less gallery to sell their work. Besides, whoever is behind this in the Soviet Union will find another Lezzard. Toronto is only a minor outlet among many. I have another argument, Audrey. Is it better that Chemakoff’s paintings—and others’ too, I’m sure there are others—is it better that they remain hidden in some vault in the Lubyanka or God knows where else? Isn’t it better that they are getting to the West and being shown? True, it enriches Lezzard and scoundrels like him in the Soviet Union, but it’s still better than the alternative.”