After Love

by Subhash Jaireth

  She paused for a moment to take breath, gulped a mouthful of cognac and continued: ‘Imagine for a moment that Stalin is dead and that our Soviet apparatchiks are ready to weigh his bloody heart. What nonsense! some of you may say – and I agree the proposition is quite absurd. There wasn’t any heart in the body of that brute, just a black hole and nothing else.’

  She took another drink. ‘Yes, I hate him, even though I know that hate only demeans us. But can you imagine: my father, the idiot, never stopped reminding me that he went to War for Tovarish Stalin, the same bloody Stalin who deported his wife, my poor mother, to die in the camps.’

  She got off her chair, pushed it aside, asked Gryzlov for a cigarette, and walked off.

  Soon it began to drizzle. The fire died. ‘You’ll catch cold, you fools,’ we heard Tetya Shura yell from inside her tent. A prolonged bout of coughing followed.

  ‘Go to bed,’ she barked again, spat lumps of phlegm and swore.

  The drizzle continued through the night. From inside our tent we could hear Tetya Shura pacing up and down, unable to sleep because of an asthma attack. I took her a hot water bottle but it didn’t help. She asked Vasu if he would give her an injection. She had everything necessary: syringes, needles, rubber band and capsules. We tied the band round her arm and struggled to locate a vein by the dim light of our torch. Once the vein had been found it was easy to insert the needle. Within an hour, Tetya Shura had settled down to sleep.

  But for a long time we couldn’t. We lay awake listening to the rain.

  ‘Why are you so quiet?’ I asked Vasu.

  ‘I’m sad for Tetya Shura,’ he replied.

  That’s when I told him the whole of Tetya Shura’s story so terribly punctuated with tragedies: famine, deportation, camps and executions.

  It rained the next day and the day after that. The digs in some kurgans were flooded. A pump was brought from the kolkhoz and we began draining water from the site. The rain had ruined our season. We felt cheated.

  If this was really where a large Scythian town had stood, we should by now have found the remains of at least one, if not more, royal tombs. But we hadn’t discovered anything remotely significant. Most kurgans had in fact been opened and robbed. Apart from a few minor trinkets, some coins and rings, nothing major, no gold nor silver, had been recovered. There were only a few ceramics, iron and bronze tools and weapons, mirrors, pots, vases and decorated bone jewellery, but not enough to establish beyond reasonable doubt that the site we were digging was indeed Gelon.

  Fortunately, however, the rival team working at a site near the Don hadn’t found anything either.

  We decided to stop our fieldwork, wind up the camp and return next season.

  On the way back to Moscow we met Aunty Olga at Kiev Station. She wanted us to break our journey and stay with her.

  ‘The chestnuts are blooming,’ she said. Vasu wasn’t well, which Aunty Olga noticed. She made us stay the night. The next day she phoned a friend and got him a pocket inhaler.

  ‘He looks fine now,’ she whispered to me as she farewelled us the following day.

  Tamrico’s Apple

  Vasu

  It was three o’ clock on a September morning, cold but not unpleasantly so.

  I was sitting huddled round a tiny kitchen table celebrating the thirtieth birthday of Vladimir’s girlfriend Katya. It was also a birthday party for Shurik, who had turned thirty-five on the same day.

  I had met Shurik, a criminal lawyer, when he had come to see Vladimir in the hospital. He loved telling stories about the Moscow militia. Tales from Slukhovaya Pravda (The Pravda of Gossips) he used to call them.

  His draftsman uncle had once worked with Konstantin Melnikov, the famous constructivist architect, and just a week earlier, Shurik had led me along the cobbled streets to Melnikov’s cylindrical house. We even went inside to look at his large desk and examine some of his sketches of Gorky Park. A few streets away we found the block of apartments where, in a room on the third floor, Shurik had been born. On that walk he also showed me the building where his mother Vera had died in the summer of 1943, fighting fires started by Nazi bombs. After his mother’s death four-year-old Shurik was sent to an orphanage in Tashkent.

  His mother, a designer, had been a minor official in the Party at one of Moscow’s textile factories. Her marriage to Isaac, a Polish Jew from Lvov, was brief, because Isaac was soon deported to a camp in Kazakhstan, where he died of cholera.

  Shurik once showed me the manuscript of his book The Private Life of Shurik Z, in which he described his trip to Kazakhstan. The book had several photos of a lakeside resort and salt mines where his father had been forced to labour.

  Shurik’s wife Tamrico was an actress in the Moscow Youth Theatre. She came from Georgia and assured me that one day she would take me to her wonderful Tbilisi to drink wine and dance the lezginka. I liked her, and not only because she played guitar and sang beautiful Georgian songs. During this party she saw that I was tired and bored and told me to pick up my parka and leave. ‘There is nothing as beautiful as Moscow in the early hours of the morning,’ she told me. ‘Go, you idiot, and don’t worry about Katya. She won’t be offended.’ Then she took an apple from the table, kissed it and shoved it into my pocket. So here I was, a solitary flaneur, ready for the city to reveal itself to me. I was dead tired and wanted to sleep but a voice inside told me to keep walking.

  It was still dark and the moon that would turn full later in the week moved along with me. Outside the Hotel Prague I saw a waiter sitting on the steps, smoking.

  ‘Come and have a cigarette,’ he invited. ‘Talk to me.’

  I ignored his invitation, turned right onto Gogol Boulevard, and stopped at the famous writer’s statue. It stood with its back to one of the most beautiful boulevards in Moscow. On the granite plinth I spotted a dog trying to chew the plastic wrapper off a bouquet of flowers. On the other side an old woman slept under a filthy blanket.

  The week before at this very spot I had witnessed a protest by four dissidents: three men and a young woman in a bright yellow sweater. They held a long red banner with white letters, the top line in Russian with an English translation underneath. The English words ‘freedom’ and ‘travel’ were misspelt.

  A crowd of onlookers had gathered to the right of Gogol. Facing them stood three militiamen in uniforms and two men in caps and black leather jackets. Two vans were parked across the boulevard, with more militiamen inside. It was a silent protest and nothing much had happened. Then suddenly a man in the crowd pulled a camera out of his backpack and took some pictures. One of the leather-jackets rushed towards him and snatched the camera, opened it and ripped out the film. The three militiamen moved quickly towards the protestors to pull down the banner. Only the young woman resisted. A militiaman, who later revealed herself as a good-looking blonde, pulled hard at the banner and the woman in the yellow sweater slipped and fell. She scraped her nose, which bled, but she kept hold of the banner.

  None of her friends moved to help her. The banner was ripped apart and lay on the ground between them. The militiawoman pulled it again and was finally able to grab it. But as she pulled it in she also ripped the sweater off the young woman who had nothing on underneath, not even a bra.

  The crowd giggled at this spectacle and the militiawoman threw the sweater back at the protestor, who struggled to her feet and joined the other three.

  All four stood silently for a while and then merely walked away. Amazingly, no one was arrested.

  As I walked past Gogol, I tried to recall the name of the woman in the yellow sweater. ‘Galya,’ I told myself, ‘yes, her name was Galya.’ The older of the three men, I recalled, the one with a beard as thick as Marx’s, had asked: ‘Galya, are you OK?’

  From the statue the boulevard sloped down, slowly curving then taking a sharp turn before culminating in the impressive arched pavilion of the Metro station. The eastern side, along which a stream used to run, is raised. The water was channelled into
a huge pipe when Moscow was rebuilt after the fires started by Napoleon’s army of occupation.

  During the day the place would be crowded with many chess players, their boards spread across the tables in front of a small three-storey building standing humbly next to a palatial house with five Ionic columns. The small building housed the headquarters of the Russian Chess Federation.

  As I reached the Metro station and stepped into the street to cross, I quickly retreated as two ambulances, followed by a militia-van and three Soviet ZiL limousines rushed past. They were no doubt carrying an important Party official to the special hospital near the Lenin Library.

  I crossed the street as mist rose above the open-air swimming pool and a row of blinking neon lights. I walked down towards the bank of the river and noticed that two letters, the first and the last ‘a’, of the sign on the pharmacy had blown off, and the third ‘m’ was blinking on and off in a strange rhythmic fashion. ‘I’ll go and sit for a few minutes on the embankment, eat my apple and then walk along the bank,’ I told myself.

  I found a spot where the river divided into separate canals, the upper following the southern wall of the Kremlin. The stone bridge over the canals looked bare and ordinary compared with the light and delicate Krymsky Bridge in the distance.

  I sat and rested but didn’t eat the apple. I took it out, looked at it and put it back in my pocket, remembering the red stain of Tamrico’s lips. I felt its warm roundness. As a child I used to carry a marble in my pocket. I would take it everywhere, even sleep with it. Jijee-ma used to laugh at me but she always made sure that the marble was with me.

  I touched the apple again. It seemed to be helping keep me awake. Because it was there, so red and so real, I knew that the city divided by the waters of the meandering river wasn’t an apparition, that I wasn’t dreaming, that my walk was real.

  I got up and walked towards the giant Ferris wheel hanging over the green treetops of Gorky Park. Suddenly I heard a splash and in the disturbed water the boats near the bank bobbed up and down in the river. After a brief moment I saw a head and arms illuminated by a bright searchlight. The person in the water was swimming towards the far bank. ‘Masha!’ I heard someone scream from the boat, ‘Ne duri’ (Don’t be stupid).

  But Masha didn’t stop, didn’t turn back. Soon she reached the other bank, dragged herself out, lay flat on the ground for a few minutes, then got up and staggered out of sight.

  I walked down some stone steps with the words ‘Masha, ne duri’ still sounding in my ears. At the railway I decided to cross the Metro Bridge, and as I approached I heard a goods train rattle across in the opposite direction.

  I stood for a few minutes in the glimmer of early morning, watching the giraffe-like towers standing over the big bowl of Luzhniki Stadium. Soon the trucks arrived to sweep and wash the streets. On the opposite bank, I noticed the hill rising and falling like an enormous python. A ridge thickly lined with trees followed the river’s curve and moved beyond it. It was slashed with steep narrow gullies full of rocks brought down by frequent landslides. Just a few weeks ago the slope had been brilliant with autumn colours. They had faded now. Only tinges of yellow and orange remained, pierced and poked by the green spikes of pines.

  I suddenly felt hungry, pulled out the apple and took a bite. I finished it very quickly and chucked the core into the river. That’s when I spotted the trampoline on the opposite slope, hidden under the arched span of the Metro Bridge. A few hours ago, as I began my walk, it had surely been the giant slalom trampoline that had flashed through my mind.

  When I reached the trampoline I wondered whether I should climb up or just go back to the Metro. I was tired and didn’t want to climb up the slippery steps. However, I knew that once I reached the platform I would be able to see the most wonderful panoramic view of the city.

  The climb was hard and I was overcome by the dank, pungent smell of decaying leaves. I reached the lift tower used by skiers going up to the platform. But the lift was closed and the door to the stairs seemed to be locked. I pushed at it and to my great surprise it opened.

  At the top of the platform there was a strong wind and it took me a few moments to stand up against it. I looked out in the direction of the Metro Bridge and saw the blue coaches of the trains rush through the station. The bridge trembled and I felt the platform beneath my feet shudder, as if disturbed by a mild tremor.

  ‘Soon the sun will rise,’ I thought, knowing that I would see the city as I had never seen it before. But then it started to drizzle and the sun hid behind the early morning clouds. Rain began to fall in thin sheets. It fell into the river, at first gently then in big gushes and splashes, as if someone had put water into a jar and shaken it.

  A ferry appeared, blowing its horn and producing clouds of stinking smoke. Its engine’s heavy chug chug chug and its delayed echo were shattered by the rough crowing of ravens which suddenly took off, circled the platform a few times and disappeared.

  I waited for the rain to stop. Soon the sunlight broke in and the city opened out before me. But I felt cheated, realising that even this wide view showed just a slice of the vast city. Slowly I began to trace the route of my walk. From where I stood I couldn’t see the Arbat and Gogol Boulevard but I could guess their position from the high-rise buildings lining Kalininsky Prospect. I saw the embankment and as I looked around I spotted the place where the girl had jumped into the river. I saw the streets curve and bend and intersect with others, all converging towards a central point. Suddenly the ring-like shape of the city I had often seen on maps revealed itself.

  I lingered on the platform for a while. As soon as I came down I felt terribly tired. All I wanted now was to reach my room on the fourteenth floor of the University building. It wasn’t far, just half an hour’s walk away.

  Back in my room I quickly fell asleep and slept soundly until the early hours of the following morning. Then I got up to write a letter to Anna, even though I knew I would see her during the day. I told her about the shapes of old cities and how they grew like complex living organisms. I told her about Vastushastra, the ancient Hindu practice of architecture and town planning, and the relation between astrology, architecture and the human body, the body of Adipurusha, the first man-as-god or god-as-man.

  ‘Although I see you every day,’ I wrote, ‘I still miss you all the time.’ Suddenly I began to write about Shurik. I told her that in spite of all his jokes and funny stories he seemed to me to be deeply sad; that I had gleaned the shades of a similar sadness in Vladimir and in many others I had met during my four years in Moscow.

  The Interview

  Anna

  I was surprised to find a rather long letter from Vasu. He hadn’t told me anything about it when I had met him at the library. In the letter he described his early morning walk after Katya’s birthday party. I liked the letter, although his habit of theorising about this or that seemed somewhat tedious. But I was intrigued by the sadness he had seen in the eyes of his Russian friends in Moscow. He called Shurik mysterious, his melancholy romantic and his story tragic. ‘Wait until I tell him Papa’s story,’ I thought. ‘It isn’t so much sadness which permeates our hearts, but the fear that we are doomed.’

  The following day I phoned Vasu to tell him that Papa wanted to meet him, and that he had also summoned Aunty Olga from Kiev.

  ‘Is this the interview then?’ he asked.

  ‘It certainly is,’ I said but assured him that he shouldn’t worry. Papa would be delighted to see him and would readily bestow his approval and blessings.

  ‘But what about Aunty Olga?’

  ‘We’ll soon find out,’ I said, laughing. Vasu, unusually for him, arrived late. I heard him walk up to the door and ring. I didn’t respond and let him ring again, then opened the door and helped him take off his pal’to and schapka and handed him a pair of slippers from the rack. ‘It’s quite windy outside,’ he began nervously. I chose to ignore this and called Papa to come and meet him, at the same time handing Vas
u a hairbrush. He noticed signs of irritation on my face and recoiled. I sighed. This would irritate Aunty Olga even more.

  I had advised him on the phone to come suitably dressed, in a nice jacket with matching tie, but he had decided to please himself and although the woollen jumper made him look fresh and young I still felt let down.

  After the introductions I ushered him into the library. He refused to sit on the sofa and moved to a chair next to Papa.

  Papa reached for his tobacco pouch and began to roll a cigarette. He could hardly have missed the expression on the face of Aunty Olga, who hated his smoking.

  We chatted. Papa said that our block, like many similar multi-storey apartments, had been constructed as a housing co-operative for scientists.

  ‘It isn’t big but it suits us perfectly,’ he added. Aunty Olga complained how cold winds whistled between the towers and Papa explained that this was because of poor siting. If the blocks had been built a few hundred metres closer to the nearby pine forest, this would have provided a shield from the wind.

  Vasu was meanwhile studying our packed bookshelves.

  ‘Anna calls this mess disorderly order,’ Papa said, looking slyly in my direction.

  ‘Needs a massive cull,’ Aunty Olga snapped.

  ‘Perhaps after I retire,’ said Papa, and both Aunty Olga and I laughed, because we knew this would never happen.

  Vasu laughed as well. As yet he hadn’t spoken a single word. To stir him up a little I reminded him of the bag he had brought with him, which was still sitting near the door. When he went to fetch it I followed him and whispered that he should cast off the dumbness he found so comfortable. But he just smiled and shrugged.

  Back in the library he opened the bag and took out his two presents: an LP for Papa and a scarf for Aunty Olga.

  He actually handed the woollen scarf to me. I pushed it away and pointed him in Aunty Olga’s direction. Papa seemed both pleased and humbled with the LP. He excused himself, went off and returned with the radiola from my room. He carefully removed the record from its sleeve, placed it on the turntable and gently lowered the needle. As it began to play he adjusted the bass and treble and fiddled with the volume. ‘This is such a rare recording,’ Papa said. It was the celebrated 1956 Verve release of Ella and Louis, the two jazz greats, in its original jacket. ‘You didn’t have to bring me anything, you know.’ But he was obviously pleased.