I had never seen him look so sad.
In the second week of September 1949, two men and a young woman had entered Papa’s office at the Institute and taken him away. It would have been pointless to resist. His office was sealed and his secretary ordered to go home and keep quiet. She didn’t, and paid heavily for her indiscretion. Tonya was away on a trip with her agitprop group and it was Aunty Olga who had to endure the raid. The apartment was sealed and she had to seek refuge with a friend.
By the time Tonya returned and was able to reach people with power and influence, it was already too late. Papa had been forced into signing a ‘confession’.
They didn’t torture him. But for two long nights they kept him awake in a cell under the strongest of lights. Then he was subjected to a lengthy interrogation led by two women. The younger seemed familiar. She had dark bobbed hair, a kind round face and wore attractive glasses.
Once the confession had been signed, she revealed that she had attended Papa’s university classes and that he was her favourite teacher. She had written the ‘confession’ herself. It did not contain anything which Papa could have called a lie. The inferences were sound and well-substantiated. He could have mounted a credible challenge against them, but then of course he would have had to ask friends and colleagues to support him, endangering them. That was out of the question. He wasn’t going to put his friends’ lives at risk.
The ‘confession’ was detailed. It was true that he, Leonid Mikhailovich Eisner, was a Russian of German descent; that he belonged to a respectable and well-to-do family of Volga Germans; that although he was an active member of the Komsomol he had never tried to join the Party; that he had spent a year in America and kept in touch through letters with a Negro woman called Josie Taylor, the granddaughter of a French sailor known to have been an active member of the Paris Commune; that he loved jazz and had produced a large amount of questionable material for a book about this decadent form of American music; that the proposed book contained a full account of the life of Valentin Parnakh, who had been sent to the camps for reformation and re-education; that Papa had contributed short articles and reviews to a little magazine about jazz; that he sympathised with Meyerhold, whose theatre and methods were denounced by the Party as formalist; that as chairman of the evaluation committee of the Ministry of Geology and Mining he had ruled against commissioning two tungsten mines in the Caucasus, a gold mine in Uzbekistan, one chromite and two lead and zinc prospects in the Urals, and that some of these were later found to be economically viable; that he had made serious and deliberate errors in judging the importance of exploring coal, oil and gas deposits in Siberia; that he was authoritarian in his dealings with his colleagues and often overlooked their recommendations; that the Party Committee at the Institute had given him several warnings about his behaviour; that he harboured scant respect for rules deemed essential for the proper functioning of a socialist collective; that because of his mistakes, the War effort against the Nazis suffered setbacks; that he and his wife had fraternised with foreigners who came to study at the Party School; and that he had invited them to parties at his home and been involved in the illegal exchange of records, tapes, books and other similarly objectionable material.
A week after the ‘confession’, Papa was allowed to meet Tonya in the presence of the second female interrogator. They sat on opposite sides of a small wooden table, one leg of which was shorter than the other three, so that each time one of them put an arm on its surface, it wobbled. For a long time he could only gaze at her face and, when the interrogator wasn’t watching, touch her hand. Tonya whispered: ‘Leynya, Dorogoi Leynya (Dear Leynya), bednyi Moi Leynya (My poor Leynya)’ and kissed his hand. ‘Ne plach, ne nado (Don’t cry; there’s no need),’ Papa replied. He could hardly bear to look at her.
Neither of them really knew what to say or do. Papa was overwhelmed by a desire to rise and reach out for Tonya and hug her. He wanted to hold her pale face in his hands and kiss her. He wanted to touch her and beg her to take care of herself and the baby. He wanted to do something he had never done before: put his head against her shoulder and sob. He wanted to turn into a four-year-old boy and run to her and hide his face in her lap, blocking out the rest of the world.
The meeting lasted fifteen minutes. Then the interrogator put away her book of Mayakovsky’s poems and told them that their time was up. Tonya rose and took a few steps towards the door, then turned back, went right up to Papa and kissed him. The interrogator started towards them but she was too late. Tonya gave her a single look then ran out of the room.
Papa was overcome by a wave of nausea and felt for the chair. As he sat he saw that Tonya had dropped her mauve scarf. He tried to pick it up, but hit his forehead on the sharp metal edge of the table. As he held the scarf he felt the blood trickle from a cut above his right eyebrow. He used the scarf to stem it, but it kept flowing. The next thing he remembered was opening his eyes in some kind of clinic. His wound had been stitched up by a nervous male nurse who did a bad job for which he later apologised.
The stitches were removed the day before Papa was taken away. With time it healed, but the scar from the botched job remained forever.
Nothing else remained of the fifteen minutes he had shared with Tonya in the meeting room. The only world they shared now was in their dreams. Only in their imagination could they talk, hold hands or kiss one another; only in dreams did they tease, laugh and shout; only in dreams did they allow themselves to hope against every hope. In their everyday worlds there was neither hope nor the will to hope.
‘I wasn’t sent to a camp,’ Papa said. ‘Tonya and that ex-student of mine must have been able to pull strings. I never found what price they paid for extracting this concession. The River Lena marked the boundaries of my freedom and I was told not to go beyond the western bank. All towns and cities with more than a thousand people in them were out of bounds. There was a small village on the eastern bank, twenty or so kilometres downstream, called Tatyur. I spent most of my five-and-a-half years of exile there. ‘It took me close to a year to get used to the utter loneliness of the long Siberian winters, but once the freezing cold became familiar, I found a way to endure the long dark nights and short sunless days. I had heard that everything froze in winter but I didn’t know that little creeks, like the one beside my wooden cabin, and the tiny lakes that pock-marked the lowlying wetlands froze completely.
‘A seven-year-old girl in the primary school where I was made to teach science and geography once showed me a slab of ice that her father had dug out of a lake. Two young taimens, similar to salmon, were trapped inside, like insects in amber. She was a curious little girl and wanted to know how amber was made. So I told her that when drops of resin released by conifers are buried with sand they turn into amber.
‘The winters were mostly quiet and windless and the sky empty, without even a crumb of a cloud, and the stars were so enormous and seemed so close that I was scared they would fall and explode. I found the sounds alien at first, uncanny, intimidating, but slowly I got used to them as well. Trees twisted and thrashed and often split; the ice cracked during the day and froze again in the evenings; the wind whistled and wheezed through the cracks in our huts and rolled over the roofs or swished through the grainy snow. Cows munched, horses sniffed and snorted and dogs barked; the gate next door creaked and clanked; and throughout the night the wood in the stove hissed and spluttered.
‘I lived through my first winter in complete silence, trying to make sense of finding myself banished to that strange, harsh land. An old man, Zakhar Dudkin, who lived on his own in the shack nearby, seemed older than anyone I had ever met. I would visit Ded (Grandpa) Zakhar, set up the samovar and boil water for the sweet tea we would drink together. Occasionally we unearthed a bottle of foul-smelling vodka but he preferred a good cigarette. One winter I was sent a parcel of books which also contained a packet of Cuban tobacco. Zakhar was in seventh heaven. “What should we do?” he asked. “Should we smoke the w
hole packet tonight or little by little, to spread the pleasure over a few more days?” We decided to go slow and let the tobacco last for as long as we could. Then maybe by some miracle another parcel would arrive.
‘It didn’t take Ded Zakhar long to discover that I wasn’t much of a talker and that he would have to keep our conversations going. Most of the time he mumbled and nibbled at words, chewing and spitting them out with no apparent order. But once I got used to this I began to make sense of his stories, often the same ones told over and over with merely a few variations.
‘Once a week his daughter Maria would come to see him, to check that there was food in the kitchen and wood in the yard for the stove. She worked in the dairy of the kolkhoz, where she and two other dairymaids were often forced to milk hundreds of cows a day. She was short, broad and incredibly strong, but the best thing about her was her laugh, loud and infectious, that remained to cheer us up for hours after she had left. She brought a few things for me and news of the outside world. She once saw me struggling with my washing and pushed me aside. “It doesn’t suit you, dear professor”, she said. “You write your books and leave such things to me.”
Papa smiled, perhaps remembering her infectious laughter. ‘Maria didn’t want me to write a book on jazz. She loved her beautiful River Lena and asked me to write about that instead. I didn’t tell her that writing about jazz was just a pretence to hide my longing for Tonya and our little girl who must by then have been walking and talking.’
‘How did you know that the baby was a girl, Papa?’ I asked him.
‘I didn’t. I just imagined it. No, that’s not true. I wished our baby to be a girl.’
Then he went on: ‘I was amazed that in that cabin, without all the research material I had collected, my imagination soared. I was free. It may sound strange but I was rescued by the capricious nature of our memory. To my surprise it erased many unnecessary details – the noisy background, as we say in geophysics – leaving with me the essence of songs, people and places. “Why do I remember this and not something else?” I would ask myself, and that’s how I came to write The Short Story of a Song.’
The song was Billie Holiday’s Strange Fruit. That night in America when Josie and Papa had been forced to leave Connie’s Inn, Josie had taken him to a nightclub in the Bronx. It was there that they listened to Billie Holiday. At first he didn’t know what to make of her, but gradually that distinctive smoky voice possessed him and when, after twelve days at sea, he landed in Leningrad, he discovered that her voice followed him everywhere. It leaked into his thoughts and spread into the crevices of his memory. Often it was so strong that he would drop whatever he was doing to listen.
In 1945 at the end of the War, a few months after the Victory Day parade in Red Square, his friend Kolya Shturmov had come to see him and brought a record of Billie Holiday’s songs. Strange Fruit was one of them. Kolya, an engineer in the army, had through luck, skill and good judgement survived the War and made his way to Berlin, where he had met a pilot from Liverpool who had played in a jazz band. The record came from him.
‘I played the song many times so that I could fully understand the words,’ Papa told us. ‘I could pick out the tune on my piano but it took me a couple of months to translate the words into Russian. I tried to sing it in my own language, but it didn’t work. Perhaps it can’t. Perhaps it’s the voice that makes it what it is. Billie Holiday is so simple: no shouts, no screams, not a hint of histrionics, and yet she shows us grief so raw, so bleak and so natural, that our hearts shrivel.
‘Then I read a piece in a jazz magazine and came to understand the song’s secret. Billie Holiday sings the song on a strangely unresolved note, the critic wrote, moving back and forth like the dead black men swinging on the poplar trees waiting for the crows to come and pluck the fruit.
‘When I started to write about Strange Fruit, it wasn’t only the lynched Negroes who were preoccupying me. News had begun to arrive of mass executions in the camps. The prisoners were trying to break out. Some even managed to escape, but the poor souls were inevitably found. The air force planes tracked them down and shot and bombed them like wild animals. Many of those who remained were executed and their corpses thrown outside.
‘Ded Zakhar told me that for weeks peasants in the kolkhozes near the camps carried dead bodies in their carts. It was left to those poor terrorised peasants to bury them with some dignity.’
Papa paused, then his face lightened. ‘The taiga summers are short but breathtaking. The days are long and warm and stars appear in cloudless skies for an hour or two, then disappear. The world comes to life in a flash, as if rushing to realise what is expected of it: flowers, fruit, everything flourishes. It doesn’t matter that autumn is just a few weeks away. Summer even transforms the way people in the taiga speak. No one mumbles any more, or whispers. Words come out full, loud and resonant, wanting to be heard.
‘One summer I took the boat from Yakutsk and sailed to the sprawling delta at the icy mouth of the Arctic Sea. To help a geophysical survey, was my excuse. Luckily no one bothered to check. The following summer I got the opportunity to make a short trip in search of where Maria’s wonderful Lena begins its journey. A few kilometres north of Lake Baikal, hidden in the ranges, is a small lake, perfectly round. It’s about sixteen hundred metres above sea level. There the Lena appears through a narrow crevice, a stream less than a metre wide and only a metre or so deep. I walked downstream for ten kilometres as it widened to five or six metres and flowed fast and noisily like a little girl who has just learnt to run, feet thumping on the ground – much like little Anna, I thought, a bit wobbly, unsure where and how to stop.
‘I remember the trip to the delta that summer not simply because it was so incredibly beautiful, but also because on my return I found a small parcel waiting for me at the cabin. It didn’t have a return address and I didn’t recognise the writing. It contained a white bag tied with red ribbon, wrapped in three layers of brown paper. In the bag were a pair each of socks and gloves, which I instantly recognised, plus a sheet of folded paper ripped from a school notebook. I unfolded the sheet and a photo fell out.’
Papa got up from his chair and walked slowly out of the room, his lit cigarette in his hand. We heard him in his room, coughing then swearing.
‘He must have bumped against the bed,’ I whispered to Vasu. ‘He often does that.’
Papa reappeared with a tiny black-and-white photo which he handed to me. In it, two women sat on a bench and, standing against its curved back, stood a little girl with a ponytail. She leant against the younger woman, her right hand clutching the collar of her coat. The other woman’s hand touched the girl’s shoulder. Only the girl smiled. ‘I’ve seen this photo,’ I suddenly remembered, went into my room and brought an album, opened it and pulled out a picture. The three of us looked at the two photos and discovered that they were slightly different: the same three figures but in different positions. The two women had swapped places in the second photo, and the little girl with the ponytail wasn’t sitting but standing on the bench. The girl with the ponytail was of course me, and the woman next to Aunty Olga was Tonya. And there was one more difference between the two photos. In Papa’s photo, the bench near the right leg of the little girl was stained.
‘I used to carry it everywhere in my pocket,’ he said. ‘Once when I was making my way across a rope bridge, I slipped and fell. Something sharp, a rock or a twig, must have pierced my skin. I noticed the blood only when I returned home that night.’
10 July 1952, the back of the photo read.
‘You must just have celebrated your second birthday,’ he said. Then he went on with the story. ‘I received three more parcels in the next two years. Later Aunty Olga explained to me the complicated route they travelled before reaching me. It took Tonya and Olga several years to find this safe way of sending the parcels. First they mailed them to Leningrad. A contact there repacked them and posted them to an address in Sverdlovsk, from where they were d
ispatched to Irkutsk to begin their short trip to me.
‘The day I received the parcel with the photo I planted a young birch in the front garden, not far from the wooden gate. Maria and Ded Zakhar warned me that it wouldn’t survive, but promised to help me look after it anyway. They were wrong. It began to grow, hesitantly at first. Once it rooted, it burst into leaf as if touched by the benevolent hand of a magician who wanted to spread hope and joy. Be patient, the little tree seemed to be telling me, your time will come. Wait and hope, hope and dream, and let your dreams nurture new hope.
On 6 March 1953, the day we were told about the death of the Great Leader, that day the radio never stopped playing Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique, Maria and I, watched by a sceptical Ded Zakhar, erected a small wooden bench near the tree. “To sit one day in the blessed shade of the beautiful tree,” Maria pronounced.’
‘Paul Robeson had come to Moscow in December 1952, to receive the Stalin Peace Prize. That was on the seventy-third birthday of the Great Leader. “The standard-bearer of the oppressed”, Robeson was called, “a fighter for the freedom of the Negroes, a beacon for honest Americans struggling against the might of imperialist reactionaries planning a treacherous war against Communists”. His concert in Moscow was transmitted live on radio. I’ll always remember his final song. It was the Song of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, in Yiddish. But you know what? In later broadcasts that song was left out. It wasn’t very hard to guess why. I don’t know what to make of Paul Robeson. I loved his voice, his songs and his kind face. But they say that in 1953 he wrote a touching tribute to our Beloved Comrade. We all have our blind spots. There were many like him who wrote such things after our Great Leader’s departure.
‘Freedom! I hate and love this word so much. It was returned to me as suddenly as it had been stolen on that cold winter evening in Moscow. When I think about it now, it seems I’d already begun to see its smiling face in my dreams, feel its touch, kiss its wonderful lips and hear it call me Papa. It was winter again, the last week of February 1955, when Nikolai, the young geologist heading the exploration party, knocked on my door. He pulled a bottle of vodka from his rucksack, asked for two glasses, opened a tin of salted cucumbers and called: “Let’s drink to your freedom, Leonid Mikhailovich.” We drank together and talked about everything: music, geology, surveys, and my book on the application of geophysical methods in the permafrost. He was a kind man who loved poetry and sang ballads to the music of his guitar.
After Love Page 8