After Love

by Subhash Jaireth

  I found the beginning slow and flat but the solo mazurka danced by Plisetskaya’s Anna in the third scene made my heart leap. The moves lacked the natural elegance of a mazurka; her steps were clipped and the curves angular, her body awkward, nervy, perhaps a pointer to the tragedy that would soon unfold. The dissonant chords of the music accentuated the flow of the dance. The effect was intense. I turned to look at Anna and she caught my glance. She slid her hand into mine and squeezed it.

  ‘Karenin,’ she whispered and handed me the opera glasses to observe the unfortunate Aleksei Karenin. His dancing was more like a laboured choreographed walk. He seemed weighed down by fate and his own inability to forgive. He was dancing with a limp, I thought, and for a moment the limp with which Leonid Mikhailovich walked flashed into my mind.

  Afterwards, over dinner at his favourite restaurant he told us about an explosion of methane gas at one of the huge coalmines which had killed at least twenty miners. He was nervous because he had been asked to chair an inquiry, and wasn’t sure how his recommendations would be received by the Party.

  We didn’t return to the dacha that night but stayed at the apartment. In the middle of the night Aunty Olga called. She was fretting about one of her Ukrainian friends who had married an American professor she had met at an economics conference in Paris. Although she had completed all the necessary paperwork and got the relevant approvals, she had still not been allowed to join her husband in New York.

  ‘So what do you think she did?’ she said after a pause. ‘She went to the American Embassy and chained herself to the fence near the entrance.’

  ‘That’s it,’ Aunty Olga concluded. ‘No America for her.’

  ‘Don’t worry about us,’ said Anna. ‘Vasu isn’t American. We’ll be fine.’

  ‘I hope so,’ she said.

  Anna

  Vasu found an epigraph for his thesis, a quotation from Marx: ‘Man lives by nature. This means nature is his body, with which he must constantly remain in tune if he is not to die. That man’s physical and spiritual life is tied to nature means no more than that nature is tied to itself, for man is part of nature.’

  I liked the quotation, which pleased him. ‘Where did you find it?’ I asked. He showed me a chapter called Alienated Labour in the collected works of Marx and Engels. Marx borrowed the idea of alienation from Hegel and reinterpreted it to fit his own theories, he told me.

  I wanted to say that the alienation we felt in this great socialist society of ours was as profound as that in any bourgeois one. But I didn’t want to upset him either. Perhaps that’s why I asked him instead about his fascination with Marxism.

  I know that his integrity is unimpeachable. To please others for short-term gain is against his nature. But it often disheartened me that a man of his intellect could be so naïve and gullible.

  He struggled to formulate his answer, and this amused me. I had never seen him like this before. If he has doubts, I said to myself, he can be saved. From what? I asked and scolded myself for being presumptuous and arrogant. What right had I to think that he needed to be saved and that only I could save him?

  He became a Marxist because of Uncle Triple K, he finally said. He had inherited it from him, not only his Marxism but his whole way of being. The world he saw around him in India and the way he perceived it reinforced his belief. The books he read gave him confidence. He knew he wasn’t the only one. There were others like him, with similar dreams and aspirations, and perhaps that was why books still remained the primary source of his inspiration.

  But, he continued, he didn’t believe in either Socialism or Communism. I wanted to object: Marxism without Communism is unthinkable. But one look at his face told me that he wouldn’t be able to handle further interrogation. I gave up, knowing that now he would sulk for days.

  The blame, I was convinced, lay with Uncle Triple K. Vasu should free himself. What good could come from living his life in the shadow of a mighty oak? To liberate others you need to liberate yourself first.

  Why did I have to be so hard on Vasu? Did I really love him? Perhaps he should have freed himself from me, too. Perhaps he should stop believing that I was the sole source of his happiness, his sky-blue dupatta. But I also suspected that if I told him to go, he would depart without a word and never return. He would feel miserable but it wouldn’t take him long to get used to my absence.

  Vasu

  Last Sunday Anna and her friend Vika gave a performance at the Chekhov House at Melikhovo. To celebrate the great short story writer’s birthday, they had been invited to play a few short pieces. We took the train from Kursky Station and travelled to the small town of Chekhovo where, outside the station, we caught an old wartime bus driven by a young woman sporting a bright red parka. She greeted us enthusiastically, obviously impressed by Anna’s cello case.

  On the bus were an old couple, a few skiers and a teenager with a little dog in her lap. By the time we arrived at Melikhovo, the clouds had dispersed, promising a bright winter afternoon with clear skies and no wind. This was surprising because the winter had been terribly cold and windy. On New Year’s Eve the temperature had dropped to thirty-eight degrees below zero and we had been forced to take refuge in bed.

  The house was hidden in a thicket of leafless birches, limes and cherry trees. It was autumn when, with Natasha, I had last visited Melikhovo. ‘To paint the autumn colours,’ she had explained. She had completed two aquarelles but I couldn’t bring myself to produce anything, overwhelmed, I think, by the dazzle of colours softened only slightly by the damp smokiness of the autumn air.

  Now everything was covered in snow: the lawn, the flowerbeds and the path around the pond. The trees were dusted with snow and their craggy branches dotted with hundreds of empty nests, shaking in the wind. In the field beyond the lawn deep footmarks led to a haystack covered in melting snow. Amid this bright whiteness stood the house with its dark walls, large white-framed windows and malachite-green roof.

  The curator, Maria Andreevna, met us at the door. She clearly didn’t know what to make of me. Her unease remained even after Anna had introduced us. I felt uncomfortable too. For a few minutes no one knew what to say. Luckily a young man appeared to ask her something about the heating, after which Maria Andreevna offered to show us round.

  As we walked she told us that the performance would start at two o’clock and that there would be fifteen to twenty people in the audience, mostly local villagers but also a few visitors from Moscow. She showed us the lounge with its piano, cushions on the floor and chairs lined up along the walls. The French doors leading to Chekhov’s study were open, and light from a large Italian window patterned the floor. The windows along the corridor wall were set with diamond-shaped stained glass. On the side wall, not far from a cuckoo clock, hung a portrait of Pushkin.

  While Anna and Vika set themselves up in the lounge for their performance, I went outside with my sketchbook.

  When the performance began there were only three men in an audience of women, mostly pensioners. Vika introduced Beethoven’s Sonata in D Major, Op. 102 No. 2. The opening movement was brisk, she said, and although it contained some short lyrical motifs, the overall mood was sombre. The slow second movement, the longest of the three, would sound like a sorrowful song, but we should be ready for the final movement which was a fast-paced, playful, almost coquettish dialogue between the piano and the cello. She said that the sonata was perhaps a little too sad for a birthday celebration but that they had chosen the piece because they wanted to honour the melancholia of Chekhov’s short life.

  Vika and Anna began slowly and a bit uncertainly but soon relaxed, looked at one another, smiled and let the music flow. Anna had already alerted me to the final fugato movement. Unlike Vika, who preferred the slow second movement, Anna was enthralled by the fugato, because in it the cello took the lead. The cello, she had explained to me, would initiate the two subject-themes, to which the piano would reply.

  When Anna began the third movement,
she glanced in Vika’s direction. She responded and soon they took off together, bouncing the allegro along with relish. The audience noticed the ensuing dialogue; several heads swayed and bodies swung. The applause that followed the climactic trill was genuine.

  During the third movement I found myself wishing that Anna would turn just for a second and look in my direction. But she didn’t. I felt miserable, like a child excluded from the joy she and Vika must have felt, transported into a world of their own by the music they were making together. Did I feel abandoned? No, just lonely, and not only because I had been left out but also because of the music itself, with its eerie, sad, yet oddly warm cadences.

  I knew that both Anna and Vika had been anxious about selecting one of the most difficult of Beethoven’s sonatas. At the rehearsals they had listened to Richter’s and Rostropovich’s interpretations and initially tried to imitate them. But soon they realised that they would have to find their own way, following the emotions the music evoked in them.

  Their performance that afternoon showed that they had been right. Perfect it might not have been, but emotionally beautiful it surely was. If they were pleased with how they had played, they didn’t show it. They merely looked exhausted. We didn’t speak much on the way back to Moscow.

  That night before we went to bed Anna observed that I hadn’t touched or kissed her the whole day. ‘Does watching me play in public intimidate you?’ she asked.

  I told her that it was hard to find the exact words to describe my feelings.

  ‘Why don’t you try?’ she challenged.

  I did try, but I failed. That night both of us found sleep hard. Lying awake and keeping quiet was even harder.

  ‘Tell me a story,’ she finally said. For some reason I began to tell her about Ariadne and ‘the poor Minotaur’.

  ‘Why “poor Minotaur”?’ she wanted to know. Before I could say anything, she turned her face to me and said: ‘You’re scared that I’ll leave you, aren’t you?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said. She kissed me, turned on her other side and fell asleep.

  Next morning, as we lay in bed still half-asleep, she told me that she wanted me to come with her to Tatyur, the remote Siberian village. ‘To see Papa’s Lena and to sit in the shadow of Annushka, the Siberian birch,’ she said.

  Anna

  From Garcia Marquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude I read Vasu a passage about Macondo, the village built by Jose Arcadio Buendia. Vasu calls its design ‘perfect’ and I know he likes it because it is near water, beside a river. The houses in Macondo are positioned with such precision that reaching the river and drawing water is just as easy from one as from another. Each house is so well-placed that it is completely shielded from the summer sun.

  Vasu drew me a map of Macondo: the mountain ranges to the east, the swamps to the south and west. What lay to the north we are not told. We found Colombia on a map in our atlas and looked for Macondo, soon discovering that although the village in the novel is fictional, the countryside around it is real.

  Shurik and Tamrico, who came to visit us last weekend, were also reading the book. Shurik had brought the English translation for Vasu and I was pleased to see how happy it had made him.

  Vladimir, Katya and her little Yasya suddenly appeared at the gate. They apologised for coming unannounced but I suspect that Tamrico and Katya must have planned this so called surprise. They were both very fond of Vasu. With me they were civil but the warmth they displayed for Vasu didn’t extend to me.

  I needed to relax with them and forget that if in the past they had found me snobbish, arrogant and unsuitable for their ‘lovely boy’, it was because they cared for him so much.

  Of the four I liked Shurik best. His constant suppressed anger intrigued me, but I suspect it was just a mask. The pain and grief he hid inside must have been unbearable.

  Shurik didn’t find One Hundred Years of Solitude amusing. Sad and distressing, he called it. We shouted him down: ‘You’re wrong!’ But everyone agreed that the plague which allowed no one to sleep was one of the best ideas in the novel. The people of Macondo can’t fall asleep or even become tired. Then they lose their memory and have to label everything.

  Shurik said he liked the memory machine invented by Jose Arcadio Buendia. It was a spinning dictionary mounted on a wheel operated by someone seated at its central shaft.

  Shurik believed that in the Soviet Union we also suffered from a plague of insomnia. The tragedy was that no one here had the courage to invent a proper memory machine. In fact, the only machine in operation was designed to induce profound amnesia.

  ‘We are doomed,’ he repeated endlessly. Vasu had told me that Shurik had become more and more restless, as if despair were eating him from the inside. He looked pale and ill and seemed to have stopped smiling.

  ‘We’re all sick but have stopped caring about it,’ he proclaimed. ‘In fact it appears we enjoy our affliction, as if we deserve nothing better.’

  He told us to read a book he had recently received from a Russian friend in Holland. The book’s Orwellian title, Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? intrigued me.

  ‘Why don’t you leave?’ Vladimir asked him. Shurik didn’t reply, but we knew that he would never go, because leaving would mean slow and painful decay in an alien land. I sensed that he still harboured some tiny hope that an enlightened tyrant would suddenly appear to announce that our system was in need of drastic surgery, that after all the masses not only craved bread and circuses but also wanted freedom to think and converse without fear or compulsion.

  ‘You’re mad, Shurik,’ Tamrico laughed. ‘A tyrant, enlightened or not, will always be a tyrant and fear will always walk beside him like a faithful dog.’

  Vasu had told me that Tamrico wanted to get pregnant but was unable to convince Shurik. ‘I don’t wish to father a slave,’ was his comment.

  Vladimir and Katya looked happy, although it wasn’t always easy to ascertain if people were really happy or just pretending. Katya was pregnant, and confident that this time she was going to make a girl. She had stopped smoking and wanted me to give up too. I was trying, but it wasn’t easy.

  Vladimir was slowly learning to enjoy the little fame that had come to him at last. Katya said that the day wasn’t far off when he would be allowed to tour abroad. To Europe first and America soon after.

  ‘We’re very happy,’ she parroted non-stop. I hoped it was true.

  Vasu

  Anna was crying, lying curled up in bed sobbing, with her face turned to the wall. I tried to touch her but she pulled away, got up and left the room. I found her sitting on the steps outside, smoking. I brought her shawl, which she took from me and put round her shoulders.

  She moved to let me sit beside her. ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked. It was past midnight and the night was dark and silent like the inside of a deep well.

  ‘Nothing and everything,’ she replied. She was no longer crying but I knew she hadn’t calmed down. She allowed me to hold her hand and I felt her whole body quivering. A pine cone dropped off the nearby tree with a sharp plop, followed by another, and I saw two bright eyes peering out at us. I pressed Anna’s hand and as we both looked up the long hoot of an owl broke the silence. It flew off into the dark leaving behind a heavy flutter in the dense cold air.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked again.

  ‘Let’s go inside,’ she said. ‘I’m cold.’ She got up, waited for me, and we went back in together. She slept quietly for the rest of the night. I found it hard to drop off and wanted to get up and read. But she wouldn’t let me, clinging to me like a frightened child.

  When I woke next morning she was ready with her bag, waiting for me. She asked me to hurry and finish breakfast, then come with her. She gave me my own bag and after we had locked the door, we sat on the steps again for a few minutes.

  It was raining when later we emerged from the Arbatskaya Metro station.

  ‘The clinic isn’t far,’
she told me. She waited for me to offer her my arm and we walked without speaking. The guard outside the clinic looked at me suspiciously but let me in. The receptionist told us that we were early and would have to wait. Quite a few forms had to be filled in and signed.

  At around two in the afternoon, the doctor called us to explain the procedure. I was asked to donate blood. It wasn’t compulsory, I was told, but simply a request to compensate a little for the blood Anna might need. ‘Of course,’ I replied. But I wasn’t allowed to go in with her. I had to wait at reception.

  ‘Why don’t you go for a walk?’ suggested the woman behind the desk. ‘It’s not raining any more. A walk will cheer you up.’

  I left the clinic wondering whether I should go and see Katya and Vladimir, who lived just a few blocks away. But as I stepped outside, a strange sense of loneliness descended on me. I looked around and felt utterly lost. The crowded street, the buses, trams and trolleys, the tall glass buildings with their shops and offices, and most of all the sun sheepishly peeping through the clouds, suddenly seemed to have turned into the weird silent landscape of a sci-fi movie.

  For a few minutes I walked almost blindly, then looked up and found myself in front of a cinema. The show had just started and the place was nearly full, so the usher led me to a seat in the back row. After the film had ended, she woke me. I left remembering nothing of the movie and the time I had spent in the cinema.

  A few weeks after the abortion Anna and I were invited to a special screening of Tarkovsky’s Solaris. There is a sequence in the film where Hari, the duplicate wife of the scientist Kris Kelvin, a woman created by the alien nebula, is injured, and he tries desperately to stop her bleeding. Then, to his great astonishment, he notices that the wound has begun to heal itself and the bleeding has ceased. The wound disappears and her unblemished skin is restored as if nothing had ever happened.