‘Maria too knocked on the door that evening. “Ded Zakhar is poorly and I have come to check on him,” she told me. She noticed the vodka bottle and the opened tin of cucumbers on the table, and I showed her the official paper. “To be freed at once and rehabilitated,” she read aloud and smiled.
‘She hurried off and came back with all sorts of good things. In no time at all a bright yellow tablecloth was spread on the table, a bottle of wine opened, a big round loaf of rye bread sliced, a plate of salad arranged, and the party began. Nikolai played the guitar and Maria sang. After a drink or two, we all began to dance. Maria let down her hair and it shone as she swayed in the flickering light of the stove, as her scarf swung and her skirt swirled.
‘I don’t remember falling asleep but when I woke I found myself in bed. Through the half-open door I saw Maria and Nikolai on the floor sleeping together. The blanket over Maria had slipped, revealing her beautiful back. It glowed like a painting forcing me to look. I felt free and happy, and then, without making noise, I crept out.
The full moon was just slipping below the horizon. I sat for a few minutes on the bench near the birch tree that I had begun to call Annushka. Then I opened the gate and walked to the frozen lake where snow swirled. I heard from beneath the ice the trickle of water, soft but clear like a flicker of hope in a dream. If sunlight could make a sound, it would be that sound.’
Papa hadn’t left Tatyur immediately. He had waited for winter to pass, for the ice to thaw and for spring to show its bare feet.
‘I wanted to live through another winter there,’ he said. ‘Perhaps I wasn’t sure that the words typed on the paper were real, although they were stamped and properly signed. Perhaps I had lost confidence in the goodness of people; perhaps the snake of doubt had entered my heart and left its poison there; perhaps I was frightened to go back in case I discovered that in my absence everything had changed. Perhaps I had found the measure of my own insignificance in the great scheme of things.’
A few weeks after the first ice floes began to move, Papa decided to pack his bags and prepare for his departure. He went to Yakutsk to say goodbye to his friends, taking a wood-saw as a present for Maria’s carpenter son. For the little girl who had been curious about the fish frozen in the ice, he found some amber he had received in one of the parcels from Leningrad. For Ded Zakhar, he managed to extract a packet of dry imported tobacco from his biologist friend. But he couldn’t decide on anything to give Maria. Nothing felt right. But then in a window he saw a pair of beautiful bright red leather boots. Luckily they fitted her perfectly.
Before he boarded the truck to Yakutsk, they sat together for a while on the bench near the birch, holding hands.
‘Don’t worry, dear professor,’ Maria told Papa, ‘I’ll look after your tree. Now just get up and go—and don’t turn and look back. Do you hear? Go, my dear man. May God be with you.’
Vasu
I didn’t have the courage to go to Anna’s apartment after her father told us the story of his exile. She left messages with the secretary of my department and with the woman on duty at the hostel, but I didn’t return her calls. I wanted to talk to her but I couldn’t. Did I feel guilty about her father? I don’t know. But I did write a long letter to Uncle Triple K soon after, telling him about the sad life of Leonid Mikhailovich. I wanted him to write back and explain why we humans fear each other so much. Is it because we know that like all machines we too will break down, that the tendency to fail is engrained in the very nature of things born or made, and that the potential for failure is always there?
We fear that our neighbour who knocked on our door to borrow a torch at night; who came and congratulated us on the birth of our children and grandchildren; who willingly shared with us his bread and salt, honey and water, milk and mangoes; who used to walk with us to the bus stop every day, will one day break into our home and attack us.
We fear that to save his own life our neighbour will agree to spy on us, to fabricate evidence, to spread rumours, to bear witness against us and incriminate us. Unfortunately the seeds of our failure to trust our own ability and the ability of those around us to remain true to our humanity are spread as soon as we become conscious of our presence in the world.
We fear others because we know that they, like us, are weak and prone to failure. We fear that we’ll lose control and hurt or even kill people. We are our own worst enemies
I wrote to Uncle Triple K about my professor, Asiya, who taught a course on the history of cities. Her lectures were like stories, illustrated with wonderful images, and she rarely used notes. An overhead projector would beam an image on the screen and she would begin to weave her stories around it.
She once invited me to dinner. There I met her younger sister Rukhaiya. Asiya and Rukhaiya were both born in a Siberian village, lost their parents when they were little, and were brought up in an orphanage named after Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the KGB. Asiya used to be the secretary of the Party branch at the university.
‘Did you know about Stalin and the camps?’ I had asked them.
‘Yes,’ they replied. ‘Most of us knew. It was hard not to know, but harder still for us to do anything. Everyone was terrified. Now it’s different.’
‘Is it really different?’ I asked.
‘Of course,’ Rukhaiya said. ‘Now if you speak out, you don’t lose you life. They just come and scare you a little. Those closed trials serve the same purpose.’
‘After Khrushchev’s famous speech,’ Asiya insisted, ‘things have definitely changed. People want to know more. And they do know more.’
I read my letter to Uncle Triple K a number of times and put it away, unable to decide if I should mail it to him. It sounded contrived, apologetic, hollow.
The following afternoon I spotted Leonid Mikhailovich in the university café. He had come to attend a meeting. He asked me to join him.
‘Thanks for Ella and Louis,’ he said. Then he told me that he needed my help to translate an English article into Russian. He asked me to come to the apartment one evening and work with him. He also wanted me to know that Anna was worried about me and that I should call her.
‘You love her, don’t you?’ he said.
Then suddenly he began talking about his ex-student, the young female interrogator who had made him sign his ‘confession’.
A year after his return from Yakutsk, this young woman had come to see him. He didn’t know how she had found his address, but it wouldn’t have been hard, since after all she worked for the KGB.
She introduced herself as Nadezhda Golubkina. Fortunately Aunty Olga wasn’t home, because she would have definitely sent her packing.
His student asked him if she could come in, and Leonid Mikhailovich let her pass through the door. She walked into the study and waited to be asked to sit down. He took her things, placed them on a chair and remained standing.
She opened her bag and took out a record wrapped in cellophane. Since she knew how much he loved jazz, she said, she had brought him this old recording of Utyosov’s songs. She said that she was going back to the university, not in Moscow but in Leningrad, and she would try and finish her degree in physics. She was three months pregnant, she confided, and because she was soon going to be a mother she had decided to come and see him.
Leonid Mikhailovich didn’t say anything, fearing that he might embarrass or humiliate her in some way.
And then she uttered the words she had come to say: ‘I’m sorry.’
‘I know,’ he replied. But he didn’t want the meeting to continue, so he told her he was seeing a friend. ‘But so nice of you to come. And thanks for the record.’
She rose, put on her coat and hat and left without another word. He stood at the window watching her walk away. She stopped and looked up and he thought she might come back, but then she started walking again, turned the corner and disappeared.
Of course he was meeting no one. He had lied, probably because he didn’t want her to tell more
lies and further demean herself.
Leonid Mikhailovich finished the story, opened his bag and started looking for something. He pulled out a photocopy of an article from an English magazine, handed it to me and said he would be interested to hear what I thought of it.
It was a short article of just three pages, one with a photo of King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band in Chicago in 1923. Third from the left was Louis Armstrong, standing next to King Oliver.
Part Two
There never really was a ‘we’ or ‘ours’
Derek Walcott, White Egrets
Letters from Kabani
Anna
A letter has arrived from Vasu, in India on a field trip. He had wanted me to go with him, but I couldn’t drop my work just like that. He didn’t understand how hard it was for us to get a passport to travel abroad.
‘They won’t let me leave the country so easily,’ I explained. ‘Yes, not even if we are married.’ In fact getting married wasn’t going to be simple either.
In his letter he wrote about the River Kabani. ‘Just as your Papa has his Lena, I too have a river of my own. It starts as a trickle from a high mountain lake, gushes through narrow ravines, cascades over waterfalls, then slows to a more sedate flow as it reaches the foothills covered with lush forest.’
He enclosed a map and a postcard. The map showed three large rivers, and I guessed that the tiny blue curve joining the majestic Cauvery was Vasu’s Kabani.
The postcard showed the Nilgiris, the Blue Mountains of the Western Ghats. ‘Like all mountains, they appear blue from a distance because of the haze caused by moisture, dust and tiny globules of oil,’ he wrote on the back. ‘But the Nilgiris’ blue comes also from a plant called neelkurunji, which flowers every twelve years and creates a blue carpet across the slopes. The elephants roaming the shola forests eat both the grass and the flowers, then turn into giant, harmless drunks. The ground shakes as they walk and when they mount the females, they must feel light and lost like autumn clouds.’
Sergei, drinking coffee with me, picked up the card, read it and began to laugh. I shouldn’t have agreed to meet him, but he had been so insistent. I suspected that things weren’t going well with Galya, she who had promised him babies. Sergei looked seedy and I took pity on him. I had picked up Vasu’s letter from one of his Indian friends, who had collected it from the Indian High Commission. The students used the diplomatic bag to send and receive their letters, not because they were secret, but because the service was cheap and fast.
Sergei and I had run into one another on the escalator in the Metro. I tried to avoid him but as I left the station to catch my bus, he had called out and caught me up.
‘You look terrible,’ I greeted him. We sat in a café talking about his work, Aunty Olga and Papa. He said he had heard rumours that Papa might be getting a big prize and a medal. He told me he had read a review of one of our string quartet’s concerts.
‘Why don’t you give up archaeology and concentrate on your music?’ he asked.
I didn’t reply, and let him talk. Galya was not even mentioned
He noticed my disinterest, which must have hurt him. To hurt me back he said: ‘I hear you are going out with a foreigner.’
‘I’m living with him,’ I wanted to say, but his sneer stopped me. That’s when, to avoid his gaze, I opened my handbag and the postcard fell out. He grabbed it and began to read. And laugh.
‘How interesting. An Indian. Do you love him?’
‘That’s none of your business,’ I replied.
‘Oh yes it is. You know I still care about you.’
‘I don’t want you to care about me. I can look after myself.’
‘I know you can,’ he said, and paused. ‘But you want to escape, don’t you? This is a dangerous game you’re playing.’
‘Stop it,’ I whispered. ‘Not one more word.’
‘You’ll get hurt. I know you will.’ The mocking smile on his face enraged me. I picked up my coffee, wanting to throw the cup at him. Luckily I didn’t. I just pushed back my chair and walked off.
I was glad he didn’t follow me.
I decided to take a long walk, just to calm down, and soon found myself near a cinema. I bought a ticket and went in. The newsreel had just finished and when the main film began, I was astounded that it was none other than The Cranes are Flying. I sat through most of it in a kind of shock, unable to work out if this was just a coincidence. I left the cinema before it ended.
Aunty Olga was sitting on a bench outside the apartment, waiting for me. I had pleaded with her many times to stop doing this but she wouldn’t listen. ‘It’s such a beautiful evening,’ she said, and she was right. It was bright and unusually breezy. I sat with her for a few moments and told her about the film.
‘Samoilova has put on weight,’ she said, ‘and doesn’t look so pretty any more. Just a few weeks ago I saw her in a play. We all get old, don’t we?’
I was pleased that she didn’t take the opportunity of reminding me how beautiful Tonya had been.
‘Let’s go home,’ she said. She put her arm in mine. Just as we were about to mount the stairs, a girl ran past, crying. Aunty Olga pulled her arm away, turned round to look, slipped and fell.
It wasn’t until later that night that we found she had broken her right wrist.
Vasu
The day after I arrived back in Kalpetta it began to rain, and it rained on alternate days after that. But the rain didn’t hinder my work. I went to meet Comrade KPS, the Chairman of the Board of the Co-operative, whose proper name was K.P.S. Nair. He told me that he had been working with the coffee farmers of the area for more than thirty years, and was one of five founding members of the Co-operative. He also held a position of some influence on the Executive Committee of the Communist Party, which ruled the state.
Comrade KPS wanted the design of the village to be attractive as well as functional, a model for other state-run co-operatives. Two young surveyors helped me prepare a good topographic map of the site, with details and contour lines. I had been assigned a field assistant, an old man called Kody. ‘His job is to look after you,’ Comrade KPS explained to me in his office. ‘He’ll show you the hills, the coffee and pepper gardens, and keep the elephants and monkeys and snakes away.’
I was expecting the village to be built on one of the terraces of the River Kabani, but the state government, I was told, didn’t want to give up prime land close to the river and the main road, so the site had been moved a few kilometres upstream of a creek which joins the river near the town of Kakanakote. The stream flows from east to west and its northern bank is higher than the southern.
I had been here for three weeks and had missed Anna every minute of them. At times I missed her so much that it hurt. During the day I was busy and the feeling of her absence retreated into the background, but in the evenings sitting alone in my room I felt miserable.
The other night I woke up startled that I had clearly seen her sitting in the chair next to my bed. Of course, she wasn’t there. It was a dream in which she sat gazing at me like Aunty Olga’s Bogomateri.
Anna would have laughed at me, I’m sure, if I told her that I carried two watches. The one she gave me last year for my birthday still showed the time in Moscow so I could keep in tune with the rhythms of her life. The Budapest scarf, which she had lent me, was folded under my pillow. Perhaps that is why she was always part of my dreams, each leaving a trace of her presence for me to carry throughout the day.
One night when it was raining yet again, I lay in bed hoping to hear the sound of her cello. I waited, then frustrated by my failure to imagine it, I walked out to the balcony. For a brief moment the rain stopped and the clouds vanished, opening up a patch of starry night, moist, fragrant and mysteriously silent. Not a leaf stirred. The street was empty but for a monkey sitting under the dim light of a lamppost like a figure in an absurdist painting. At the other side a man squatted at his tea-stall, coughing insistently, his stove glowing bright red an
d yellow against the darkness.
I stood on the balcony waiting for something that seemed about to happen. When the silence became unbearable I turned to go inside. Suddenly there was a heavy downpour. I looked out again. The monkey hopped about then sat still, stuck in the painting. The tea-stall man turned his face up towards the balcony.
I went inside, made myself a cup of tea and drank it there, enjoying the silence that followed the downpour.
Anna
Aunty Olga’s wrist and right arm were put in plaster. Although she wanted to return to Kiev, Papa convinced her that she should stay in Moscow. ‘Annushka will look after you,’ he promised. But he didn’t know how hard it was to please his ‘angel of a sister’.
Meanwhile letters from Vasu kept coming and coming. When did he find the time to write at such length? Clearly he was lonely. There was no question of my writing back as frequently as he expected or desired, let alone as charmingly as he did, as if trying to impress me.
He wrote that he missed my cello. Before he left for India I had been rehearsing French ‘songs without words’ which we wanted to include in one of our concerts. His favourite was Ravel’s Kaddish, which he would make me play again and again. His take on music is rather naïve and all my attempts to make him appreciate Faure’s Tristesse and Massenet’s Elégie have failed.
Then suddenly one day Vasu’s friend Vladimir phoned, wanting to know when he would be back. We started talking and out of the blue he invited me to accompany him to a live reading of Isaac Babel’s story The Widow. I knew the story, and although I didn’t particularly like it, I agreed. He said he would send us two tickets to the opening night of the play Dialogues with Socrates at the Mayakovsky Drama Theatre. He was playing one of his small roles.
After Love Page 9