If Only You Knew

by Alice Jolly

  The child wants to leave those people behind and stay in the warmth and the light. This is the place her father told her about, the place he was going to take her to. A turquoise and gold beach, a place where the sun’s rays spread like the spokes of a wheel. Dad, Dad. I’m waiting for you. Take me there.

  12/20 rue de Lausanne, Geneva

  December 1991

  Silence. His pen has stopped. My bloodless fingers uncrumple. I sit back, raise my shoulders and stretch my arms. The words are all out. I’ve set this story free. I look around this pale apartment – unwashed plates on the floor, clothes strewn across chairs. I listen to the noises of the building. The lift sighs up and down its shaft, someone is running a bath, a small dog yaps. I yawn and stare down at my pyjamas and cardigan. When did I last sleep? I’m so tired I can hardly stand. This feels like putting down a heavy bag.

  Tears come suddenly and I welcome them. I know now how high the cost of unshed tears can be. If you don’t grieve for someone properly, then in future you’ll make someone else stand in their place.

  I pull open the window and breathe in the winter air. It tastes of pine trees and mountains. Sharp as peppermint, it clears the nose and lungs. Could there actually be more air here than in other cities? Strange that I never noticed it before. I go to the kitchen, sobbing noisily, my eyes and nose running. I slop milk into my tea and it gathers in lumps. I fling the tea down the sink, sob, wipe at my eyes, and go to the bedroom to put on my clothes. I can’t find socks but I put on Wellington boots.

  Outside, the day is giddy with wind and splatters of rain. Soggy leaves and stray paper bags drift along the pavement. I start to enjoy the brisk wind on my face, but I can’t allow myself that. It feels like betrayal. I’m insulted by my own capacity for rejuvenation. I was never going to enjoy anything again. I stamp down the pavement in my Wellingtons, still crying. Clouds scurry across a low sky. I buy milk, bread, tinned soup, cheese and oranges. Then I walk down to the lake and stare out at its receding lines of blue and grey. In the far distance, a line of sun touches the water.

  I lay my hand on the metal rail and savour the feel of its cold, chipped paint. The wind catches at my coat, and creeps in under my scarf. I take off a Wellington boot and put my foot on the wet tarmac. Taking off the other boot, I walk a few steps. My feet are icy, the stones of the tarmac deliciously sharp. I move my foot back and forwards, heel toe, heel toe. I feel the geometry of my leg muscles shift. The earth is satisfyingly firm beneath me. Heel toe, heel toe. The wind buffets at me, tugging at my bare ankles. A man in a suit walks past, trying not to stare.

  I go back to the flat, warm a tin of soup and eat it with some bread. Then I wander into the hall. Jack’s things are still spread all over the floor, just where I left them – when? Weeks ago. His sea-shell paperweight, the tin which contained the shortbread I gave him. I kneel down on the floor, bury my face in his overcoat. It’s only now I begin to understand that he’s gone. I find that brown envelope postmarked 23 August 1991 – the information he said he’d get for me. The last piece of the puzzle. Except it doesn’t seem important now.

  The envelope contains a blurred photocopy of a page from a magazine. In one corner the date has been underlined – December 1966. Two asterisks have been scratched in Biro next to an article beneath it. The text is so faded I can hardly read it. The planet Venus … completing its eight-year cycle … 6 January … a planet associated with reconciliation and renewal … sometimes called the bearer of light. So that was what my father was looking for that night. In his diseased mind, he thought that he could become like a Mayan shaman and harness the power of Venus. To bring a star down to earth, to find peace inside his own head. I stare at the paper again. As so often, Jack was right. But my question is – how could Jack have understood my father when he’d never even met him?

  I open one of his cardboard files which is lying on the floor. Inside are faded photographs, documents on yellowed paper, letters written in Cyrillic script. On a list of names I find one underlined in pencil, marked with a star. I manage to decipher the letterhead. These papers relate to an asylum. Not a place where Jack worked recently, a place from long ago. Was he trying to find out where his mother died? My story. His story. The two may be more similar than I ever understood. Both of us searching for the past. All those Katias and Svetlanas. Layers of yearning. Did they take him back, however briefly, to some moment of perfect love? Perhaps Jack needed to save me in order to save himself?

  The truth is that I never knew him.

  The thought comes at me sideways. It has the lemon-sharp sting of revelation. I turn it over in my mind. I loved him, I’m sure I did. But I didn’t know him. His words come back to me – love such as yours doesn’t respect the person who is loved. I remember that last day at the dacha. He was dying, and yet he comforted me, and I never really saw what was happening to him. Some words of my mother’s drift back to me. If you love someone you see them just as they are. I didn’t want to listen when she said that. Maya’s version of my father was so much easier to accept. But finally it was my mother who knew my father. Maya merely loved him.

  I pick up one of his notebooks. I turn the pages and see my name. Eva, Eva, Eva. I shut the notebook then open it again. Every word is about me. I always thought that I was the lover and he the beloved, that I kissed while he turned his cheek, but maybe it was always the other way around.

  An image comes into my head of a globe, and voices are shouting from everywhere, and pleading hands are raised – love me, love me, love me. But next to every single one of those pleading people there’s someone who loves them but the pleading person never sees. They just go on and on, shouting, stretching out their hands. It’s so much easier to give love than to receive it. I think of Sasha, and his I don’t have any shelf to put that on.

  As I move through the flat, I become aware that something extraordinary is happening. I’m alive now as I’ve never been before. The truth is energy, it is life. The kitchen table, the tiled floor, the wide windows and white walls – everything is exaggerated, enchanted. It’s as though I’m seeing it all for the first time. In the bathroom, I look in the mirror and, for a moment, I see the shadow of Jack’s face behind my eyes. And both of our faces are like that day at the Church of the Resurrection – luminous, immediate, exalted. I’ve spent all of my life locked in my own head and yet it’s only now that I know myself. I am here, I am here. Welcome home.

  I go back into the sitting room, trying to keep a hold of this feeling. I flick through this pile of paper on my desk, each page scrawled with knitted words. Changes are written crooked in the margin, asterisks and arrows dig into the paper. I think of Mr Balashov, weeping over his wife’s scraps of coloured wool and her magnifying glass. He had his grief, this is mine. Once a feeling becomes a word, then we are released from its grip. And somehow, without my knowing it, the words did turn into a story. My story. Me. And it isn’t just the truth I can bear. It’s all of the truth. Because Jack would have expected no less.

  And something more – some other change – has happened while I’ve been writing. I can’t say that a pattern has emerged, but now that I’ve stopped trying to explain that time in Moscow, it has started to explain itself. The answer is not a blurred photocopy in an envelope, nor a mathematical equation or an intellectual argument. Instead it’s the feeling of spiky tarmac, the wind flickering against my ankles, the rain under the sole of my foot.

  30/16 Ulitsa Pravdy, Moscow

  August 1991

  The body breaks when the mind won’t. Jack and I – we were both of us dead. I lay in that carpet-covered Moscow bedroom, still as a corpse. Why didn’t he take me with him? A wedge of yellow light widened and then narrowed as the bedroom door moved back and forth, clicked open and shut.

  Sasha, Vladimir, Bill. Voices told the story of the coup again and again. How they waited at the White House for the attack. How women and children were sent home. A blackout was imposed. But then the coup leaders lost their nerve, fl
ed. Then Gorbachev came back from the Crimea. This story was repeated until it could be believed, until it was real and the mind could digest it.

  Sasha came, brought me a bowl of soup. He told me the faxes had gone through and that the newspaper had been produced in Voronezh and Nizhnii Novgorod. ‘What you did,’ he said, ‘it was very brave.’ I woke and slept, woke and slept. Gathered my limbs together under the duvet, stuck my fingernails into my leg to check I was still there. Brave. Everyone said that, while the light at the window changed from day to night and back again. A journalist friend of Rob’s wanted to interview me. But bravery, I thought, implies choice. And wherever I was that night, I was in a place far beyond choice. And yet still they said it. I’d become a heroine by accident.

  Rob’s face appeared sometimes in the numb haze which surrounded me. His eyes hid from mine and he said nothing about bravery. Some fragment of memory from the night of the coup came into my mind. We’d been standing in the kitchen. His hand had gripped the collar of my shirt. His face was close to mine. Eva, where were you? What were you doing? You shouldn’t have gone out. You were crazy to go anywhere near that place. How could you? How could you? Amnesia-Rhodesia-catfever. Water splashing over the side of a sink. I had nearly become a woman who involved herself in politics in a way that was inappropriate. Above me, the five-armed lamp swayed and contracted like the tentacles of an octopus. Did that scene in the kitchen ever happen?

  I slept and woke to find Bill bringing me some bread and cheese. I knew, although I couldn’t have said how, that Sarah had left him and gone back to America. His trainers were dirty and his smile brutal. A glass of vodka seemed to have become part of his left hand.

  ‘Wasn’t there shooting?’ I said to him. ‘And someone was killed?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Three people were killed. God only knows how it wasn’t more. A man was crushed right under a tank and another brought down by a ricochet bullet. Outside the American Embassy – that’s where the worst fighting was. But you know for me,’ Bill said, ‘the strangest thing was that no one here really knew what was happening. There you are, right in the middle of the damned thing, and you don’t have a clue. Truth is, I spent most of my time on the phone to New York trying to find out what was going on. And, you know, that’s why the coup failed. The plotters should have cut the power, or the international telephone lines. They didn’t understand that they needed to control information.’

  Rob was dismantling our lives, packing our books, bundling clothes into boxes, taking pictures down from the wall. We talked briefly about whether he should try to change the flights. Would I be well enough to travel? I couldn’t think why he was talking about flights. What did that matter? He decided to leave the flights as they were. Above me, the five-armed light dissolved and reformed. I heard Rob on the telephone. Who was he talking to? My mother? He seemed to be repeating the same words again and again, and his voice had a serrated edge. For a moment I felt the whole flat falling away from us. I opened my mouth to shout at Rob, ‘Take care, take care.’ But no words came and I dropped back against the pillow, helpless.

  The radio crackled, cut into silence, then a voice reported that the Communist Party had been banned and the headquarters of the KGB had been sealed off. The people working there had been told to leave, the building was being searched. The reporter described a statue of Dzerzhinskii, the founder of the KGB, standing in Lubianskaia Ploshchad’. It was being covered in a net of ropes and men were hacking at it with metal cutting equipment. A crowd had gathered, chanting, waiting for the statue to fall.

  I woke and blue evening light shone at the window. Rob was sitting on a chair near the bed, reading a book. I watched his down-turned eyes flicking over the words. His hand moved to turn a page. His shoulders, his spine, his head, were twisted up, like pieces of metal after a car accident. A bottle of vodka stood on the floor beside him and he reached down and filled his glass. He looked up and saw me watching him. Are you OK? Yes, I’m fine. And you? How are you? Fine, fine, how are you? But that old refrain could do nothing for us now.

  With a sudden clarity I understood that he knew about the party and the lake and the ice. I said, ‘You talked to my mother?’ And he said, ‘Yes, I did.’ And we sat in the half-darkness, staring at each other with horror growing in the reflected light of our eyes.

  ‘Your father nearly killed you,’ Rob said. ‘He took you out onto a frozen lake. But your mother never told you that, and she never told me. I didn’t even know he was a manic depressive. There was always some story about him being ill … But what I can’t believe is that your mother thought she’d get away with it, and that neither of us would ever find out.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘Yes, I know.’ Rob and I both know. The facts sink through our skin, and right down into the marrow of our bones. But we don’t want to know, and the only way to hide from that knowledge is to hide from each other. And really that’s how it’s always been.

  ‘I asked her the question directly,’ Rob went on. ‘When you were ill over the summer I rang and I asked her several times, because I’d always wondered. And I said then, “Tell me, is there something specific? Is there something I need to know?”’

  I should have walked over to the chair then and gathered him into my arms. Pain brings people together – isn’t that how it’s meant to be? I knew that it was worse for Rob than for me. I’d probably always known, at some level, that my mother would lie to me, but Rob had believed in her entirely. I watched him shift in his chair – that twist in his body, that wince which he suppressed. For him, the world had always been so simple. On one side stood the dramatic and unreliable – my father, his mother, Maya. And then on the other side stood the good woman, my mother. But now the plastic soldiers had all been mown down and lay scattered on the carpet.

  ‘I thought that the truth would somehow be splendid,’ I said. ‘I thought it would be spectacular.’ Those were my words, but I wondered even as I spoke what I had really expected. After all, whoever heard of a happy secret? The human mind is so very ingenious in its unending games of hide and seek. I looked at Rob and knew how it must be for him, and I wanted to save him from it, but it was already too late. Far too late. From that night when I’d first met Jack, when he’d touched my spine, questions had started and now they could never be stopped.

  Rob and I talked then about who was to blame for what happened that night. My father took me out onto a frozen lake. Maya encouraged me to follow him. My mother failed to stand up to Maya. For a moment we found comfort in this dry analysis, but our words soon stuttered and came to a halt. Apportioning blame was only a way of denying the pain my parents must have lived through. All we knew for sure was that my mother shouldn’t have lied to me afterwards. But how do you tell your daughter that her father nearly killed her?

  ‘But your mother must have known,’ Rob said. ‘She must have known what the effect of that he would be.’

  ‘I don’t know. She was frightened I’d finish up like my father. But I’m not ill, and I never have been. I don’t even have asthma. All I’ve ever suffered from are the effects of living in a world where the truth couldn’t be spoken.’

  Rob stood up and moved over to the bed. We wanted to hug then, or kiss, but both of us felt so tainted that we couldn’t bear to touch. It seemed that the whole of our relationship had been based on some misunderstanding. We were neither of us the same people we had been before. So Rob turned away and continued to pack shoes into a box. What else was there to do? We needed to move on. Impermanence was the only home we knew. I saw myself walking through the ungrasped days in yet another city, waiting endlessly to turn a certain corner, waiting to think, Oh yes, this is it, the place where I was always meant to be.

  Our lives went on, driven by the necessities of each day. And all the time I wanted to help Rob, or at least to talk. Even to say honestly that I had no help to offer. But we were held in an ancient silence, trained from childhood not to know, not to see. We lacked the vocabulary
of emotion. Our minds were heavy with shame. We’d been failed, but we’d also failed each other.

  Rob, who had always been so vigorous, moved slowly through the flat. He held a tie or a book in his hand and stared at it. Standing at the window, he looked down into the courtyard with unseeing eyes. He lost the ability to take small decisions. Was it worth taking the bookshelves with us or should we buy new ones later? The discussion about that went back and forth. Yes, no, yes, no. What did I think? What should we do? In Rob’s voice I heard a rising note of panic.

  One endless night as we lay in bed, side by side, not touching, he turned to me and said, ‘You know, you’ve been very brave.’

  ‘What – the faxes?’ But I knew he didn’t mean the faxes.

  Then again, later, he said, ‘I understand it now. When I was a child, and I came to stay with you, my father would always say, “Take care of Katarina and Eva now, won’t you? Be sure to take care of them.” But I just thought it was something he said.’

  One morning Rob was on the telephone, making calls for more than an hour. I listened to the radio. The celebration was over now and the hangover had set in. The radio reports pointed out that only fifty thousand people had defended the White House, which was nothing in a city of ten million. Then it was rumoured that Gorbachev had organized the coup himself in order to flush out the right wing. Perhaps more food was now on offer in the shops, but inflation meant that people couldn’t afford to buy it.

  Rob came into the bedroom bringing a cup of tea. ‘Listen, Eva. We’re not going to Zagreb.’

  ‘Why? What happened?’

  ‘I decided against it. But it’s a bit complicated. They’ll give me a post in Geneva instead, but I have to go to Zagreb until Christmas, until they can appoint someone to the post there.’