After Love

by Subhash Jaireth

  The formal part of the dinner-meeting took place in his well-furnished drawing room, where he sat at a desk with a Cuban cigar in his mouth. He offered me one and was strangely surprised that I didn’t smoke. I told him about my asthma. Promptly he put his cigar out.

  The major issue facing me, according to him, was that he knew from many previous cases that marriages like the one I was about to enter often went horribly wrong. Like the good lawyer he was, he listed possible problems, all of which were based on the undeniable fact that Anna was Russian. Did she speak Hindi or English? he asked me. When I shook my head, he looked serious. ‘You see, this will be a great problem. It will make her life very, very difficult.’ In addition, because she was a komsomol, a member of the Communist youth league, she would automatically become an object of interest for Indian authorities. ‘The Soviets won’t let her go without a written or unwritten guarantee that even if she won’t spy for them, when required she will help them acquire what they term “useful information”. You know that’s how they work over here. We have to be vigilant. I hope you understand our situation.’

  I told him that I understood the implications very well, and that my decision was final.

  ‘No, no,’ he insisted, ‘please don’t misunderstand me. As far as we’re concerned you are of course absolutely and perfectly free to do whatever is in your own interests. My duty is to ensure that I’ve warned you. That’s all.’

  He gave me four weeks to think about his advice and if I hadn’t changed my mind he would do everything in his power to, as he put it, conclude the matter successfully. He further advised me that although it wasn’t an essential requirement, it would facilitate ‘my case’ if I were to obtain written approval from my father or someone else with authority in my family.

  ‘So you still want to marry me?’ Anna asked after hearing my account of the meeting.

  ‘It’s all so complicated.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘I have a month to consider.’

  ‘After which you may change your mind?’

  ‘You know I won’t.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I love you, you idiot, that’s why. Love you more than—’

  ‘I know. I’m sorry.’ She looked at me and grinned. ‘Let’s make a baby. They can’t stop us marrying then.’

  This was unexpected. I was stunned. ‘Are you serious?’ I stammered.

  ‘Caught you, ha,’ she said, and giggled. ‘I was joking, stupid. It’s too early to think about babies.’

  Anna

  I knew that he enjoyed touching me but looking at me, he confided, gave him even more pleasure. Touching, he explained, brought everything too close, whereas looking restored the necessary distance. Looking and touching, he went on, were two different but complementary events of the same act of feeling the world. Take the opera glasses we hire in a theatre: through one end the world draws near and splits into minute details, while through the other it recedes and forms itself into one big whole.

  It was true that he loved to theorise, but he loved even more to look at me, dressed or undressed. Like a child he adored my being with him and for him. I could feel how this pleasure lit him up from inside like a glow-worm. Then when I got into bed he would seem so warm, soft and cuddly that I’d feel like suckling him like a baby.

  I loved his boyish face and found his attempts to disguise it with a beard and a pair of serious spectacles childish. I knew that his boyish look annoyed him but it wasn’t in his nature to show anger or frustration. I had never seen him lose control. Only in bed did he appear vulnerable. Even when he was exhausted he would stay awake for me. I knew he couldn’t go to sleep without me, but I wanted to be asked, implored: ‘Can you please come to bed now?’ But he just waited and waited, in silence. Patience, seemingly immeasurable, was his most definitive attribute.

  He never missed a chance to watch me dress and undress, and if I felt like it, I would prolong these moments. I enjoyed seeing him in love with me and relished the intensity with which he desired me. But I realised that by being so open about his longing and his love, he had made himself especially vulnerable, and this realisation troubled me, because the power that I had inadvertently gained could have very easily emptied the noble feeling of love I harboured for him. I confess that at times I was tempted to exploit the precarious situation he had brought upon himself by letting his happiness be ruled by my often fickle moods and emotions.

  When I shut the door to undress, he realised that something had gone wrong, that I was annoyed and was punishing him. When I came to bed fully covered he knew that I had made myself inaccessible, that on such nights I would judge his attempts to reach me as violations, that I wanted to be left alone. Strangely he never complained. Like a child, he had learnt to accept his fate. He felt miserable, I know, but understood that once punishment had been meted out and endured, life would once again return to normal.

  But did life really regain its usual balance after going through these episodes of power-play and emotional torture? Didn’t they corrode our trust in one another? It was as if we were unpicking one by one the seams which bound the fabric of our being in the world, because to be in this world is to be for and with someone.

  Vasu

  After the wedding we moved into the family dacha. Our life there was simple, straightforward and sensible. Most of the time we worked together. One big room was converted into a studio with a large drawing board and a tall table lamp not far from the window. Anna worked at a table in the corner editing my thesis and I helped her translate her book on Gelon. A celebrated English publisher was interested in it.

  ‘You’ll be famous,’ I teased her, ‘and further books and articles will be written about you and your book.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ she retorted. ‘No one really cares. I’m writing this book because it’s the best thing I can do.’

  ‘What about your cello?’

  ‘You know that I only like music because I’ve grown up with it.’

  This sort of indifference disappointed me because I knew that she truly loved music and that archaeology too wasn’t just her profession.

  She sat and typed on a portable machine, asking questions whenever she was defeated by my awful handwriting or my cumbersome sentences. She forced me to break the really lengthy ones into several that were short and succinct. Convoluted ideas were reduced to coherent explanations neatly joined up with proper punctuation.

  ‘Why don’t you write the way you tell stories?’ she complained. I would blame the strict conventions of scholarly work, the way it pretended to sound scientific, and the pompous authoritative third-person voice.

  Anna listened impatiently. ‘But your thesis is about people and places,’ she said.

  ‘So is your book,’ I replied. This upset her even more.

  But by and large she was happy with what I had written. Her main concern was that it didn’t contain a single quote from Lenin. ‘Without him, your thesis won’t get through,’ she nagged.

  I also enjoyed translating her book, although it wasn’t as easy as I had initially thought. I asked her questions, sought clarifications. That tested her patience even more.

  ‘With translation you have to be careful,’ I told her. ‘It’s like pouring water: the containers often differ in shape and size, so there are spills and awkward overflows—’

  ‘I know that, thank you very much,’ she interrupted, irritated by my patronising tone.

  I was pleased that she had started taking English lessons. She had learned some German at school, where it was compulsory. She was finding English hard, the grammar and spelling in particular. But she was trying.

  Anna

  Vasu loved to talk about old and new cities. ‘Tell me about Amsterdam,’ I would ask him, for instance, and in a flash his whole appearance would change. He would become utterly glorious in this animated state. His voice trembled, his eyes sparkled, his head shook and his arms and hands wafted and waved. He would leap out o
f bed to get his sketch book, completely forgetting that he had nothing on and that the room was freezing cold.

  He would jump back into bed and say ‘Look!’ and in less than a minute the shape of the city would appear on the page. He would draw and talk at the same time, words tumbling out as if he were scared that he wouldn’t be able to tell me everything and that the moment would be lost forever.

  ‘Amsterdam used to be a small fishing village near the mouth of the Amstel,’ he told me, showing me the shoreline, the narrow delta and the meandering bend of the river. ‘That’s where it gets its name: the dammed Amstel.’

  ‘First they built a sea-dyke to protect the village from the tides, then they dammed the river and put a bridge across it.’ The dam and the bridge appeared on the page, followed by a semicircular canal with a wall protecting the settlement on three sides.

  ‘In the seventeenth century, when a new plan for the city was accepted, they constructed three canals following the shape of the outer moat. They were joined by four others running at right angles, creating a complex network more than eighty kilometres long. Parallel to these ran the streets and the main thoroughfares, criss-crossed by the famous bridges, steep, arched and hump-backed. Along the streets they planted rows of elm and lime trees and behind them stood the tall, gabled redbrick houses of the rich burghers.’

  He showed me his sketch. ‘It’s like a spider web, isn’t it?’ I said.

  ‘Yes it is,’ he said, pulling up the bedclothes and continuing the story.

  ‘The Dutch mastered the design of watercities. In the Leninka I found an English translation of a pamphlet by Simon Stevin, the Dutchman who refined the art of building such cities. He was a genius. Soon other famous cities followed—’

  ‘One of them our own St Petersburg,’ I interrupted him. ‘But of the others I have no clue.’ He laughed at the phrase ‘no clue’, and I let him enjoy the moment, because it made him very seductive.

  ‘The other famous one was at the southern end of an island, east of the Hudson River,’ he said. ‘It was called New Amsterdam.’

  ‘Which later became the famous New York,’ I added.

  I was amazed at the way he was able to remember the exact shapes of so many cities. ‘There’s nothing particularly clever about it,’ he said. ‘All I need is one visual clue and the whole thing pours out by itself.’ Brasilia reminded him of an eagle flying down from a hill, ready to land in the lake to take a dip. Venice, when he drew it, appeared like two hands clasped together.

  He thought Alexandria the most beautiful city in the world. In his drawing it had the shape of an ibis lying on brown sand washed by the turquoise waters of a warm sea.

  ‘Leningrad, if you could see it like a bird flying high in the sky, would appear as a triple-headed python.’

  ‘And what about Moscow?’

  ‘It’s like you,’ he said, smiling mischievously. He drew mounds, round and soft, intersected by streams and rivers. The best plan for a city in such undulating landscape, smoothed by glaciers, had to be a system of concentric rings.

  This time I felt his hands and fingers tracing lines and shapes on my body, not his notebook.

  One day he drew only a triangle, at the three corners of which he wrote: Topography, Technology and Translation. ‘The shape of a city is defined by these three elements,’ he lectured.

  ‘Is it really so simple?’ I teased him.

  ‘Not at all,’ he replied and added a fourth corner. This represented land and its ownership: its value, commercial and symbolic.

  ‘I am looking for a word starting with T for it as well,’ he continued, ‘but I can’t find it. So I call the system 3Ts and an L.’

  I found it amusing, this drive of his to transform ideas into neat schemata with regular geometrical shapes, well-defined and properly labelled.

  ‘What about Translation?’ I asked.

  ‘By that I mean communication, movement and flow,’ he said. ‘Communication brings people together and converts a town or city into what the Greeks used to call the polis. Plato said that an ideal city would be limited to the number of citizens who could hear a single voice.’

  He sighed. ‘Technology has changed everything. The polis has turned into megalopolis, a gargantuan agglomeration of space crowded with people. Communication so often fails in our modern cities.’

  ‘If you’re so attached to your T, why not call it Transport?’ I asked.

  ‘Translation is both exact and a metaphor. I love metaphors,’ he confessed. He planned to write a thick book on the history of urban design using the 3Ts and an L as an organising principle. The largest section would be devoted to Translation because he was convinced that without communication, cities as living entities wither and die.

  Once he got going, he was unstoppable. ‘Cities need rivers, lakes, canals and fountains to relieve the unyielding built-up spaces. The flow and trickle of water adds a sense of time and, like a mirror, it produces reflections, fluid and flickering, for us to look at and ponder.’

  ‘How will you ever finish such an ambitious book?’ I teased. ‘Why don’t you work on something smaller, a bit more realistic?’

  His face became sad. ‘Yes, you’re right. It is too ambitious. Just like your Papa’s book on jazz.’

  Vasu

  We were sitting in the studio working when suddenly Anna looked at me and asked abruptly: ‘Do you find me beautiful?’

  It was so unexpected that I found myself unable to answer. I was scared my silence would be taken the wrong way.

  ‘No need to hurry,’ she finally said. ‘Take your time – and when you’ve thought about it a bit more, please let me know.’

  Then she rushed out the door.

  It took me a full three days to come up with a proper answer.

  ‘This is for you,’ I said, handing her a sketch. In it she was standing holding the cello in her left hand. Her hair was gathered into a ponytail and her face, dominated by her big eyes, looked straight out. She was wearing a summer dress and her other arm was resting on the back of the chair. The window was open and a pigeon sat on the sill looking at her.

  ‘So you do find me attractive?’ she said. ‘And don’t say of course.’

  I kept quiet and just as I was about to speak she came right up and kissed me. As she turned away I heard her sob.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. She looked at the sketch and asked me if she could keep it.

  I told her that of course she could and as she gazed at it again, a naughty smile appeared on her face. ‘I like it – but I want to hear you actually utter the words as well. Tell me, why do you find me attractive?’

  Then before I could say anything, she walked out of the studio.

  Anna

  I took a photo of Vasu sitting outside on the steps in his sky-blue shirt and denim jeans, his hair nicely washed and combed, his moustache and his pointed Lenin-beard in need of trimming. He looked so pensive and anxious. I could see it in the way his lips were tightened. When I touched him, he trembled.

  I had been late home that night and he had been worried about me. I went inside, grabbed the camera and took the photo. He seemed on the verge of tears. I must confess that I wanted him to cry, to find out if he really could.

  He didn’t, but I kept the photo. ‘This is for me,’ I told him, ‘and for our daughter to see and remember. This image will stay in the filing cabinet of my memory. Isn’t that the way it works? Traces forever etched into our minds?’

  I wanted to provoke him into saying something about memory in his own special style. He took the bait and began to tell me about the magical power of visual images and the way they inhabit the memory. Then he quoted his favourite Bergson and went into a long explanation of the relation between mind, matter and memory.

  ‘The mind is not a receptacle, my dear Anna, where words and images find a place to nest or where, like bees, we deposit nectar. It’s not the brain either, a mushy mix of grey and white matter. Memory doesn’t live inside or outside o
ur mind or body. It doesn’t live at all, because its lifespan in the world is infinitesimally brief. Like a match which produces fire when rubbed against the rough surface of a box, so memory is produced each time we try to remember. We recreate it each time we recall.’

  I felt terrible the way I laid such traps for him. The poor soul fell into them every time.

  Vasu

  There was no television in the dacha at Prudkino and we rarely bothered with the newspapers. ‘In Pravda,’ we would say, ‘there is no pravda (truth) and Izvestia is without any izvestii (news).’

  Our radio played only music. But rumours were everywhere. Often they would walk in with our visitors. When Aunty Olga came to stay overnight, she brought with her fresh stories of scandals and intrigues.

  Soon I stopped reading Russian newspapers altogether but kept my ears open for anecdotes, jokes and stories. Whenever I had a few spare minutes I would note them down in my diary in Hindi, not because I wished to hide them from Anna but because I didn’t want to forget my own language.

  Leonid Mikhailovich seemed to ignore them both: the news and the gossip. He was too busy with his work. One evening he invited us to a ballet at the Bolshoi. He had told us that he would meet us near the main entrance but we didn’t find him there and had to wait. When he finally arrived in a taxi – unusual for him – he found us both huddled miserably under a big umbrella. He hurried towards us, slipped, and dropped his bag.

  We rushed to help him up. ‘Are you all right, Papa?’ Anna asked anxiously.

  ‘Of course,’ he replied.

  By the time we entered the hall we found the artistic director onstage introducing Plisetskaya’s Anna Karenina. The director was short and round and spoke with a pronounced lisp. Luckily his speech didn’t last long. As he left the stage he stumbled, looked out at the audience and laughed. People clapped and giggled.

  The conductor arrived in the pit, the lights dimmed and the curtain opened onto a railway platform, much simpler than most Bolshoi sets. There were just a few props and a brass band on the right-hand side of the stage. The musical opening was brief. We heard the whistle of a steam engine and the rattle of wheels, followed by screeching brakes. Then the music became softer and we heard the sound of footsteps. Someone shouted ostorozhno (beware) as the dancers appeared on the stage.