If Only You Knew

by Alice Jolly

  Rob came home one day and told me that one of his colleagues from New York, who was black, had come to Moscow for a meeting, and had been spat on twice in the street. Then Rob got involved in a row with our landlord who was trying to double our rent. One day we came back to find that someone had tried to break the lock off our door. As always, when we asked, no one in the building had seen or heard anything. Moscow – an echo chamber, a hall of mirrors, an unending game of Chinese whispers. I was fed up with being broad-minded and culturally aware. I wanted to go home.

  I kept praying for spring – sun on my skin, a glitter of green in the trees. But winter only faded into days of mud and slush. Paving slabs rocked on the street, throwing up spurts of dirty water. I jumped over the gutters, avoiding one puddle after another. The debris of winter was scraped into small bonfires which smoked and spluttered along the sides of the roads.

  At night I lay awake watching the five-armed lamp above me, the brown carpet stuck to the wall, the red digital numbers on the alarm clock. Or I sat at the window staring out at the monochrome lines of roofs and windows, balconies, television aerials. If Rob was away then I’d get up at four or five o’clock and go to look for Jack. I’d take the first Metro and then walk south along the Liusinovskaia Bol’shaia, seeing the streets turning grey then pink as the dawn came.

  In Jack’s street the bones of a car lay by the side of the road. Windows were grey and dusty. Everywhere was littered with cigarette ends, plastic bags, empty vodka bottles. I’d go to his building and sit in the doorway opposite with my head propped against the wall, watching. A rusted children’s swing in the playground next to his building moved one inch back, one inch forward, in the sullen breeze. Today the curtain on the left is fully drawn, the other one pulled halfway across. But is that how they were yesterday? Once I took a piece of paper with me so I could draw their position but the next day I couldn’t find it.

  At the college, rumours circulated that someone had been defrauding Mr Baloni and that they would be sacked. The staff were called in to see him one by one. When it came to my turn, I sat there quite casually, staring across the expanse of his desk. His face was mottled grey and pink, and his eye was half-closed up by a sty. It was rumoured that his Russian girlfriend had left him. She’d found an American banker who’d bought her a BMW. Mr Baloni rubbed a weary hand over his sore eye and explained to me about the mysterious numbers on the phone bill, and the paper missing from beside the copier. ‘Really?’ I said. ‘How extraordinary. Of course, I’ve no idea who would do that.’ My act was convincing but, as I was leaving the room, I tripped over a wastepaper bin. I steadied myself, but the throbbing in my head was so bad I couldn’t see where the door was.

  Mr Baloni called me back and enquired after my health. Moving around the desk, he laid a fleshy hand on my arm. Then, from the fridge behind his desk, he produced a bottle and poured me some sickly pink alcohol. It was quite all right, he said. He understood that many people in Moscow needed photocopying facilities. He was worried about me – why was I so sad? I didn’t answer him. He rubbed again at his sore eye. I thought of the Leninskii Prospyekt, the new condominium, the empty apartment. He wandered over to the bay window. From there he could see out towards the Garden Ring, the road dipping down into the underpass, the tower blocks of the Novyi Arbat. He stood there for a long time, staring out, then turned back to me and shrugged. ‘People are run over by buses. And they fall off cliffs. And then there is love …’

  Jack possessed every inch of me. In my head I talked to him all day. Sometimes I spoke in tenderness but more often in anger. I wanted to know, Why did you do it? Why, why, why? I tried so hard to hate him. But even before that word was fully formed in my mind, it dissolved into tenderness. Love, hate – the pendulum swung back and forward. At the extremes, these things are close.

  I longed for my mind to break. They’d taken my father into an institution, perhaps they’d do the same for me. The idea seemed attractive. I hoped to collapse in the street, choking on my swallowed tongue, my body twitching, my lips babbling and dribbling. Instead I kept on going to the college each day, there and back, there and back. I thought of myself like a clockwork rabbit banging a drum, on and on.

  One day when Rob was away, I was returning from the college, and stopped close to the high arch which led into our courtyard. I needed to try again to button up my coat. This should have been simple – the coat had six buttons and six button-holes. Except that sometimes there were five buttons and six holes, or six buttons and five holes. Under the shelter of the arch I counted up. Six buttons but only five holes? I’d already stopped three or four times on the way home to re-do it, but still I couldn’t get it right.

  Beside me, a car rolled through puddles and drew to a stop. It had smoked-glass windows and, as the door opened, I thought of Mafia kidnappings. A voice called my name. I looked into the car and saw, in the gloom, Maya’s hand with its snake-head ring gripping the curl of her walking stick. ‘Eva, get into the car.’ I was turning away when the end of her walking stick hooked itself around my neck. I pushed the stick away but then I saw the look in Maya’s eyes, and knew that there was no point in resisting any longer. As the car pulled away Maya was leaning back, her neck craning upwards. ‘You live there? It’s ridiculous. To-o-tally ridiculous.’

  The car swept through the streets, the chauffeur using the central lane, despite the rule which says that that part of the road is reserved for members of the Communist Party only. The leather seat was slippery beneath my coat. We passed the American Embassy, then turned right, past my college. From the bridge I saw the White House down on the riverbank, like an ocean liner with a curved prow. Then we moved on towards the Triumphal Arch and the wide sweep of the Kutuzovskii Prospyekt.

  The car stopped outside Maya’s building and we went up in the lift together. I chatted about the weather, the college, the political situation. The clockwork rabbit banging its drum. The heating was off in the flat and the air felt damp. The rooms were full of Jack – the night of the party when I’d seen his shoes moving close to Maya’s sofa, the door to that bedroom where he’d touched my spine. The clockwork rabbit faltered, but then asked politely about Harvey. Maya’s hand fumbled, and she swore in French as she tried to force the plug of a blow-heater into a socket. She placed the heater beside the sofa, where it breathed hot air and a smell of burnt dust. Then she stood up and looked me over inch by inch. ‘Oh my God, whatever has he done to you?’

  ‘Nothing. Nothing. I’m quite all right.’

  The clockwork rabbit banged its last bang. Tears flooded down my face. I cried in noisy sobs, with my head against Maya’s bony chest. She made me lie down in that same room where I’d first talked to Jack. The bed was piled with blankets and duvets, and Maya moved the blow-heater next to me, but I couldn’t get warm. She said to me that she was going to call a doctor and I let her do it. By the time she came back with tea and vodka, I was calmer. She found me a handkerchief and I blew my nose and wiped my eyes. Sitting by the bed she shook her head, and tapped her finger up and down on her glass of vodka. “‘Yet each man kills the thing he loves …”’

  ‘But why? Why is it like that?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. If you love someone then you tend to lay bare parts of that person they’d rather keep hidden. And then they can become brutal.’ She leant over to straighten the blankets and then pushed a cup of tea towards me. ‘But you know, Eva, don’t you, that no-o-thing done in love is ever wrong, or ever wasted?’

  We heard Harvey coming in, clearing his throat, and creating that familiar clattering in the hall. When he opened the door, I sat up and started wiping my eyes. ‘Well, here you all are then,’ he said. Maya looked at him and raised her eyebrows. He waved a hand, said something about work, and shuffled out again.

  ‘I just don’t understand why I’m like this,’ I said.

  ‘I’d say it runs in the family.’

  ‘What? Madness?’ I didn’t like that word but I forced myself to
use it.

  Maya turned wide eyes on me. ‘No, not that. Is that what your mother said about your father? You shouldn’t think that. Too often, what is labelled as mental illness is just a legitimate reaction to the circumstances someone is living in.’

  ‘But he was in a hospital.’

  ‘Well, no, that was the problem. It wasn’t a hospital, just some Catholic institution, and if he didn’t have a problem before he went there, they certainly ensured that he so-o-on did. For myself, I always knew there wasn’t anything the matter with him, and I don’t think there’s anything the matter with yo-o-u. Some people are passionate by nature and I don’t think they should have to apologize for that.’

  So that was it. Some people are passionate by nature.

  ‘But what am I going to do? I can’t just forget about all this and marry Rob.’

  ‘I don’t know. When I married Harvey I was probably in much the same state as you’re in now. Not a great start for a marriage. But, you know, for all that, we’ve been happy enough. Fulfilment doesn’t come through love alone. Family, community, work – these things are ne-e-cessary as well. There’s love, and there’s life, and sometimes the two don’t go together.’

  ‘But I won’t ever forget.’

  ‘Of course you won’t. For every woman there’s always the man she should have married.’

  I blew my nose, wiped my hair out of my eyes, and settled back under the blanket. ‘You know, the truth is I often didn’t even like him. That must be what drugs are like – the more you take, the less effect they have, but you keep on taking more and more because you want to get back to that first feeling.’

  ‘Well, yes,’ Maya said. ‘Addiction. That’s what it is. My son’s doctors say that if you can only get pleasure out of one thing, then the pleasure you get is very extreme. What you need is to be able to feel with all your senses, and then you can get enjoyment out of a wider range of experiences.’

  ‘So theoretically I should be able to get the same feeling if I go for a nice walk in the country or look at a vase of flowers? Is that it?’

  ‘Yes. One should be able to reach that place in one’s mind.’

  ‘And you believe that?’

  Maya considers this question, her head on one side. ‘Yes, oddly, I do. Although I myself have never discovered that place.’

  10/38 Kutuzovskii Prospyekt, Moscow

  May 1991

  Maya’s doctor gave me tranquillizers which dropped me into a dreamless sleep. I woke more tired than before, and slept again. Night, day, sleep, wake. I was in that room where I’d first talked to Jack. Occasionally I thought, I really should get up, but then Maya appeared with those yellow pills and I slid back into warmth and stillness. I suspect that Maya and Rob had a row about where I should stay. I heard voices tangling in the kitchen one afternoon before I slid back into darkness.

  Then one morning I opened my eyes and summer had arrived. The window of the bedroom hung open and the sun burned down on to the stained concrete wall of the building next door. Maya came with a glass of water and I sat on the bed, enjoying the light and watching the curtain blowing in the breeze. Soon after that, Rob came and I went home with him. Maya didn’t want me to go but Rob insisted. I didn’t really care where I went.

  Our courtyard had become a different place. Washing hung from balconies, people walked with their heads up and looked each other in the eye. Dust blew up in sudden spirals, and the drains smelt. For a week the whole city was covered in lumps of white fluff, like cottonwool. My colleagues told me that this was pukh – which is spores from poplar trees. It lay on the ground, inches deep, like a kind of summer snow. When the wind blew, it rose into my eyes and mouth and made my nose itch. If I went outside for even five minutes then I had to pick handfuls of it off my clothes. Everyone was relieved when a torrent of warm rain cleared it away.

  I removed all of our landlord’s junk off our balcony and sat out there through evenings which were long and light. Women came out into our courtyard, hung up carpets and beat them with hooped carpet-beaters, raising clouds of dust. Men with motorbikes revved their engines outside our building, their leather jackets decorated with swastikas and Tsarist eagles. Our new neighbour sometimes went out to join them, leaving his dog, slobbering and panting, tied to the stair-rail outside our flat.

  I put on summer dresses and felt as thin as a pipe-cleaner. When I wasn’t at the college I slept for long hours in the June heat. Sometimes for a whole quarter of an hour I didn’t think about Jack. A stray dog took up residence in our courtyard. In the afternoons it lay in the sun, twitching its ear occasionally to remove a fly. I took down a bowl of water and some stale bread. A man in the flats opposite shouted at me and I stuck out my tongue.

  One day I sat on a low wall in the courtyard reading a book of translated Russian poetry which Jack had lent to me. The babushka from downstairs came hurrying out. ‘Devushka, ne sidi na stene,’ she hissed, and flapped at me, waving her handkerchief, until I got off the wall. What was she saying? If you sit on that wall then you’ll never be able to have children? Surely I’d misunderstood. When Rob came home he confirmed that all babushka firmly believe that if a young woman sits on a wall or a railing, even in the middle of summer, then she’ll finish up infertile. That made me laugh more than I’d done in months.

  Most evenings I went to see Maya. In her flat the windows were sometimes open, but the blinds were still down. Lounging on the sofa, she wore elaborate safari-style suits made of pale linen, and complained about the heat just as bitterly as she’d complained about the cold. She was reading an e-e-xcellent new book about the Russian Revolution. Su-u-ch a tragedy. All that hope and possibility all brought to nothing.

  One evening my mother rang and Rob talked to her, then put his hand over the mouthpiece. ‘Please, Eva, speak to her. She’s so worried about you.’ I took the phone and heard my mother’s voice. ‘Flu can really be so very lowering, can’t it?’ She told me about the wisteria along the back of the house – better than ever this year, although she hoped it wouldn’t damage the brickwork. And she had had some lovely walks on the marsh. So nice to have a little more time to spare, what with her job coming to an end. Wisteria, coastal walks, worries about the brickwork. I suppose that after my father left she had to decide to take an interest in such things. What else could she do? But probably she didn’t find it that difficult. She’d always wanted a small life.

  Around us, Moscow was changing. We heard more Western voices on the streets. The new joint-venture hotels were full of businessmen. Advertising hoardings sprang up everywhere. Prostitution became more public. Porn magazines and pirated videos started to be sold in the Metro and underground walkways. Cars with smoked-glass windows rolled idly by. Strip clubs were opening and cinemas showing bad Western films. While most people continued to earn the equivalent of one hundred dollars a month, some could afford to spend two hundred dollars on one bottle of French champagne. Rob said that democracy was becoming nothing more than a theatrical performance designed to mask the emergence of a gangster society. I began to ask myself whether the old couple downstairs, with their Lenin pictures and medals, were not as mad as I’d thought.

  July came and Moscow was fractious in the heat. Lines of cars filled the roads heading out of town, their roof-racks stacked with rakes, brushes, and bags of concrete, flapping under tarpaulin. I’d thought only rich Russians had dachas but it seemed that everyone had somewhere to go. Rob said that growing vegetables at dachas, pickling and preserving, had once been a hobby for the Russians but now it was a means of survival. The city was quiet and listless. Mosquitoes buzzed and the air was sticky.

  One day I got back from the college to find Rob already at home. ‘Listen, you know that UN guy who asked for my CV? Well, he rang to offer me a job.’

  ‘Really? Here?’

  ‘No, not here. Probably Belgrade or Zagreb. The problem is, that the situation in Yugoslavia is changing so quickly they just don’t know where their offices need t
o be.’

  I looked out across the courtyard. The elderly couple from the ground floor were sitting out on the bench. He wore his medals, as always, and she wore her yellow dress and matching headscarf. I suddenly wanted to take the silver birch trees, the grey-green concrete blocks, the whole city in my arms. Rob was still talking, telling me that if he took the job, then I might not be able to go with him at first. I might have to go back to England, but that would only be for a month or two, not longer.

  ‘And when would it be?’

  ‘Beginning of September – but it depends. We need to talk about it.’

  It was already the middle of July. Zagreb? Belgrade? Shake up the world and pick out a city. Despite the evening sun shining in through the window, I shivered. If we left Moscow then it was certain I’d never see Jack again.

  ‘Do you want to take the job?’ I asked.

  Rob sat down at the kitchen table. Well, of course, the UN is a hopeless organization, he said. The bureaucracy would drive him mad within a week. But the work did sound interesting, and the job was a real promotion. He probably needed to do something like that for a while, if he wanted to be taken seriously. I looked at Rob and wondered what had happened to him. With him it had always been freedom, democracy, civil society. Now it was experience, and bureaucracy, and being taken seriously. Was it him or his political commitment which I’d always found attractive?

  ‘But nothing’s decided,’ he said. ‘Not at all. We’ve got to be sure this is the right move for you. You’ve been brave about Moscow …’

  ‘Yes, but if you want the job you should take it.’

  What else could I say? I wandered through into the sitting room and found the atlas. Yugoslavia was coloured pink. It didn’t seem like a proper country at all, just a ragged piece torn from the fabric of a formless peninsula. But if we weren’t staying in Moscow, then what did it matter where we went? And so it was all agreed. Tomorrow Rob would tell Bill he was leaving and we’d give notice on the flat. I hoped that we might be able to go back to England, or somewhere else, for a couple of weeks before Rob started the new job, but Rob said he’d probably have to work through August. Maybe we’d have a week to spare, not more.