If Only You Knew

by Alice Jolly

  ‘Eva, you can’t blame yourself for that. Nothing is ever the fault of a child.’

  The snow at the window has stopped. ‘I have to go.’ He helps me put on my coat and scarf, and then walks to the Paveletskaia Metro with me. The streets are silent and bright as day. Our feet sink down deep. A snow plough rattles past. The wind blows, stirring up an ice-flecked dust.

  ‘So what will we do?’ I say.

  ‘I’ll work something out. And I’ll call you. Soon.’

  He kisses me goodbye and I look up at him. ‘This will be a disaster – you know that, don’t you?’

  ‘Probably. But a brave disaster.’

  As I arrive back at Byelorusskaia, I prepare my story for Rob. Sorry, so sorry I’m late. I met up with my friend from college and took the Metro back as far as Borovitskaia, but then the snow came and the Metro stopped working. But fortunately I was near the flat of another colleague and so I sheltered there for a couple of hours. The important thing is not to explain too much. I can feel how the lies will pirouette off my tongue.

  As I walk up the stairs and pass the window with the star-shaped fracture, I can smell Jack in my hair. Rob will surely smell it too. I step over the landing crack and open the front door. Immediately I know that something is wrong. When I walk into the sitting room, Rob doesn’t even turn around. He’s standing in front of the television with Vladimir and Sasha. Their sunless faces and red eyes don’t move from the screen. A man I don’t know is talking on the phone. ‘The Soviet army has stormed the television building in Vilnius,’ Rob says. ‘This morning they seized the main printing works and the defence headquarters. People are being shot or crushed beneath the tanks.’

  ‘But it’s a freely elected government there.’

  ‘Not any more. Some Soviet-led Committee for National Salvation has taken power.’ On the television screen, fuzzy black-and-white figures move across a grass bank below a high wall. Gunfire sounds and a tank appears. Those figures, no more than flecks of black on the screen, are hemmed in between the grass bank and the guns. The turret of a tank swivels towards them. Shots sound again and a flash lights the sky. Vladimir speaks to me in Spanish. He says, ‘Only three days ago Gorbachev promised that he wouldn’t use force, he said there’d be a negotiated solution.’

  Sasha tells me that Rolandas Jursenas is trapped inside the building. He’s a Lithuanian journalist who came to supper here once, not long after I arrived. I slip away through the watching faces and into the bedroom, then stand with my face gripped in my hands. In the sitting room the news report finishes. Sasha is arguing with Rob. ‘Gorbachev isn’t responsible for this. This is hard-liners in the military.’

  ‘Well, that may be the case, but if Gorbachev has no control over the military, then why is anybody bothering to talk to him?’ Discussions continue in Russian, arrangements about the newspaper, who will ring who and when. I hear the front door open and muttered farewells.

  When Rob comes into the bedroom, I’m sitting on the bed, still wearing my coat. I wonder if Jack has heard this news and what he’ll think about it. He often pretends not to care what happens in Russia but I know that it does matter to him – more perhaps than anything else.

  ‘Did they find out anything about Rolandas?’ I ask.

  ‘No. The phone lines are down. My guess is that he’s dead.’

  ‘Do you think so?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The West won’t intervene to stop this, will they?’

  ‘No, no chance. They’re too busy in the Gulf, protecting oil supplies. Look at Hungary in fifty-six, Prague in sixty-eight, Poland in eighty-one. It’s the same all over again. They might cut food aid but that’s as far as they’ll go.’

  ‘And that just means that poor people will starve.’

  ‘Yes. And I think the violence is certain to spread. Apparently, two thousand troops have just been sent to force Estonians to enlist in the Soviet army.’ He sits down beside me. ‘You know, if this situation gets worse you shouldn’t stay here.’

  ‘Rob, I don’t care what happens. I’m going to stay with you.’

  I hate myself for that, but Rob bends down and hugs me, and when I hug him back, I mean it. I try to focus on Vilnius, the black stick figures on the grass bank, the high wall, the tank moving in towards them. But my mind is with Jack. I remember when we heard that news report in the café. He said then that this would happen soon after Christmas. How had he predicted it so accurately? I take care not to think about that Aeroflot ticket on his desk.

  When Rob comes to bed we’re both sleepless and lie looking up at the curtainless window. I turn over and wrap my arms around him. ‘So what happened to you?’ he says. ‘In the storm?’ I tell him my story and I want him to challenge me, to say, That isn’t true. But he doesn’t and I curse him because he’s making this too easy. He should be stopping me. I lie there wishing that I could tell him everything. I want to say, I’m going to do something terrible. I can’t stop myself. Please forgive me, please.

  12/20 rue de Lausanne, Geneva

  September 1991

  The body has its own memory. In the deep Geneva nights, I turn in bed and a movement of my spine brings back an echo of his touch. I wake prickling with sweat, calling his name. I feel his lips against mine. His words muffle deep against my eardrum and his imagined finger rests on my collar bone. My body is formless now that it no longer rests between his hands.

  I cannot stay in bed. I am drawn to his desk, to his pen. He had his theories about words, now I have mine. I write in defiance of time. In that Moscow hotel room, nothing remains. Even in the particles of dust under the chest of drawers, not one of our cells survives. The hand of time smoothes out every crease. But our fingers did lie laced together on that bed, our breath did unsettle the air of that room. I write to insist on that.

  Around me, boxes remain unpacked, a pile of unopened post lies on the sofa. Coffee cups are lined up along the side of the desk, and a bowl contains the dregs of tinned tomato soup. I look at my watch – one o’clock in the morning. Outside, car headlights flicker along the road. Beyond that there is blackness – no sign of the lake. A starless, moonless night.

  I let my hand go and see where it will lead. Words work their way up my spine, rising like damp. They come from the heart, from the liver, from the soles of my feet. The story is already there, it’s just a case of chiselling it out. I cut and polish, positioning words so they catch the light. But still none of this expresses exactly how it was. I don’t want to write about that time, I want to write the time itself.

  The Hotel Universitet, Moscow

  January 1991

  It shouldn’t have been possible for us to go there. In Moscow you can’t just walk into a hotel and book a room, but somehow Jack organized it. A 1960s tower block near the Rizhskii Vokzal, the foyer was a place of dusty rubber plants, black leather sofas and watching eyes. We always had the same room – high up above the city, silent and light. Number 815.

  I see us there now, walking along a red-carpeted corridor towards that room. The floor lady has a gold-tipped tooth and sits under pictures of Lenin and muscular Soviet workers. We open the door on to that nondescript room – narrow and high – with bubbly wallpaper, which peels along the seams and is covered over by cream paint. A mirror shines on the wardrobe door, light falls through the window on to the sheets, in the bathroom a tap drips.

  That first day we were both so shy, and I hadn’t thought he’d be like that, because I’d seen him with other women – the easy way he laid his hand on their shoulder, whispered to them, laughed. But there was always a certain formality in the way he behaved to me. It wasn’t at all like you see it in films. He didn’t push me back against the wall, press his lips furiously against my mouth, struggle to get my clothes off. Instead, he took off his coat and hung it in the wardrobe. I took off mine as well, and put it down on a red velvet armchair, with a sagging gold fringe. Carefully I straightened the sleeve of my coat and brushed a patch of dust from
the collar. Then I went to look at the only picture in the room, a landscape which hung crooked beside the door. It was painted in thick oils, the perspective twisted, the colours brash. It showed a man and a woman walking away along a road which narrowed into the far distance.

  Jack drew the thin curtains half-shut over the lace blinds, sat down on the bed and put out his hands to me. I sat down beside him, watched him undo the laces of his shoes and thought, Whatever am I doing here? The feeling was one of shock, disbelief, mild hysteria. Surely this won’t really happen?

  He said he wondered if I’d be hungry because he’d brought us some bread, apples and vodka. In the bathroom he found a tooth mug and we drank from it together. We lay down on the bed and kissed uncertainly. Then I stood up, took off my boots, socks, thick tights. The buckle of his watch clicked on the glass of the bedside table. I took off my bra and my pants, and turned to him. He was sitting on the bed, quite naked. I moved towards him and he drew me close, so that I stood between his legs. He reached up, undid the crucifix around my neck and put it on the bedside table. In the half-light, his face was hidden but I looked down at the thickness of his grey hair, and the shadows of his eyes.

  He placed his hands on my hips and looked up at me. Leaning forward, he kissed my stomach, gently. ‘Beautiful.’ From his voice I knew that he was close to tears and I was embarrassed. We lay down on the bed and he kissed my breasts. ‘You’re very white.’

  ‘I do get brown sometimes.’

  ‘Don’t.’ His hands moved over my body and it was as though he was creating me, forming me. My flesh was like clay and from it he made the curve of my hip, the line of my thighs. He moved my legs apart and dropped his head between them. I felt his tongue touch me, and the feeling went up through my body, arching my back and stopping my breath. For a long moment he kissed me there. I was trembling, watching my own body moving, seeing the top of his head. When he kissed my lips again, he stopped for a moment to look at me. His golden eyes held me in their light. I’d never looked at anyone as I looked at him then.

  His hand touched between my legs. He lay beside me and I watched his wrist moving. The world had shrunk to the size of that room. I felt stiffness drain from me, and I nestled close to him, my head against his shoulders. Then suddenly it broke upon me and I turned my head to press against him, and felt the spasms again and again, and then held him close, my face against the grey hair of his chest, before I leaned down to take him in my mouth.

  Room 815 – for two months, all my life happened there. Love without a future is so very easy. My mind was numb, I was lost in the physical, I never slept. My breasts were sore, I ached inside, my legs were shaky, I was hungry an hour after I’d eaten. I was fired by a burning energy. Problems dissolved before I even approached them. Everything was connected, and it all made sense. I balanced somewhere far up high, defying gravity. Objects insisted on their presence, lights dazzled, colours clashed, the air itself was unstable. I was capable of grasping the globe in my arms. The veil between heaven and earth was perilously thin.

  Making love – I’d heard those words before but I’d never really known what they meant. With him there was nothing to lose. He was entirely open, completely without shame. In that hotel room I took off my skin, as well as my clothes. I wanted to be his, and his, and his. I wanted to become him. We shared such tenderness, such a desire to soothe. And I couldn’t understand it because I’d never wanted a sexual relationship with him, and I’d never thought of myself as someone much interested in sex.

  And yet there I was, ambushed by desire, a sexual woman against my will. I wore high-heeled shoes which Maya lent me. They were too big, and slipped and slid on the ice-cracked pavements, but I wore them anyway. My body felt skinless beneath my clothes. I was as big and brazen as Mrs Balashova. I put my hair up in a high ponytail and wore a low-cut top. Was this sexual woman the latest cardboard cut-out? Or was she the real person behind all those two-dimensional dolls? I worried, of course, that Rob might see the difference in me and become suspicious, but he never said anything. He didn’t see because he was determined not to see.

  I felt loved. A trite little phrase. I mean so much more than that. I felt it in my body. Going through me like a shock, touching places never touched before. I couldn’t understand how I had lived in a world where I was apparently so much loved, and yet I’d never really felt that before. Rob loved me, my mother loved me. Other men, briefly, had claimed to love me, and I was sure that I was passionate about them, but still I’d never felt anything like this before.

  Whatever that feeling was, other people were aware of it too. When Jack and I were together, it rose off our skin like a scent. Even when I was alone, people knew. Mr Baloni at the college made a clumsy pass at me. Even the hopscotch girl stopped for a moment, standing on one foot, and let her face break into a smile, as I came up the stairs.

  I knew that Jack didn’t love me as I loved him, but he let me love and that was enough. One afternoon, as we lay in that hotel room, watching flakes of snow drifting down at the window, I turned to him and said, ‘Oh, we are such actors, aren’t we?’ He gave me a long look, then started to laugh. And I knew he liked me more than ever because I’d said that.

  We didn’t always make love, sometimes he was too tired. I never minded that. It was enough to lie there, feeling our bodies close together, the sounds of them echoing one against the other. Despite his thinness, his body was strangely yielding. The passage of time was recorded on his skin. A childhood scar above the line of his left eyebrow, red veins from raw winters, a line of stitches across one knee, shadows the colour of bruises beneath his eyes. Was it my imagination or did those shadows deepen as the days ticked by?

  Once I stayed with him in that room all night when Rob was away. In the morning I lay with my head propped against the foot of the bed and held one of his feet in my hands. White skin, straight toes, high arches, each bone clearly delineated. ‘You know we talked about places you can remember which seemed absolutely perfect?’ I said. ‘Where is like that for you?’ And he told me about a small town in Provence called La Coste, which he’d visited once with his wife. By chance I knew the place. I’d cycled through there one university holiday, and stayed a couple of nights.

  ‘We’ll go there together,’ I said, and that became a game we played often, imagining how it would be. A room high up, looking down over the crooked roofs of the town, the sleeping yellow stones, the fields purple with lavender. The room would be in an old house with shuttered windows, and we’d have a key to lock the door. In the cool of the mornings we’d wake and open the shutters and look down at the fields below, covered in mist.

  That hotel room was our secret and no one knew – except for Maya. I never told her but there was no need. The first time I went there, I visited her flat straight afterwards. As soon as I walked in the door she came towards me and sniffed the air. ‘I can smell it on you,’ she said, and we both started to laugh. I never asked whether it was him she could smell, or the sex, or the deception.

  After that, I often went to her flat after I’d been with Jack. She made me round after round of hot buttered toast, or scrambled egg and smoked salmon, followed by slabs of chocolate cake. After I’d eaten she made me sit close to her on the sofa. Sometimes I went to sleep there and woke to find her fingers stroking my arm.

  One evening, as I sat at her kitchen table, spreading butter on a third slice of toast, I tried to put it into words. ‘It’s like burning up all of your life in one afternoon. And you’re just desperately trying to hold on to that feeling …’ Tears suddenly poured down my face. I didn’t know whether I was happy or sad, but I pushed my plate back, laid my head down on the table, and sobbed. When I looked up at Maya, her face was tight with fear. And I heard the words she didn’t say. Oh my dear, do be careful. She’d seen all this somewhere before.

  Far in the background, the shell of my old life remained uncracked. I made supper for Rob, sent faxes for Sasha, bought a doll in a Beryozka shop for
the hopscotch girl, tried to persuade Mr Balashov to move out, hit back, broker a peace. The line of my mother’s puppy-dog cards stretched right across the windowsill. In my mind I taunted her, Look, I’ve turned into the person you never wanted me to be.

  As March came I waited to hear about Rob’s contract but days passed and no news came. I knew that if it wasn’t signed we’d leave Moscow soon. Rob was too proud to say anything much, but I knew he was angry about the delays. Every day as I walked into our building I waited for the one-armed babushka at the bottom of our stairs to hand me a letter from my father, but I didn’t worry when she told me, yet again, that no letter had arrived. He’d write back to me. It was only a question of time. At the college I taught my students the conditional tense. If I were a doctor, then I’d find a cure. If we were free, we’d go to the South of France now. If I worked for the Democracy Foundation, I’d sign Rob’s contract immediately.

  All day, every day, I worried that Rob would find out. I imagined him following me to the hotel. If I heard a movement in the corridor I knew it was him. I sometimes checked three times that the door of Room 815 was locked. In my head I was ready with alibis and explanations to account for everything I did. Yes, I did pop into that hotel, a woman I teach works there. Jack, yes, I do have lunch with him from time to time. I worried that Rob would meet one of my colleagues and make a comment about the time we supposedly spent together. Every time he started a conversation I thought, Is this it? This time will he accuse me? Some part of me may even have wanted that. Dread, perhaps, always consists of longing as well as fear.