On the bed, white as any stretch of fresh snow, was Vladimir. His head, bald and small, resting on two pillows, seemed tiny as a little boy’s. His eyes were shut and his arms lay at his side, hands and fingers absolutely still, legs straight and in the place of feet just a small hump. Only his head and the shape of his feet showed that there was indeed someone lying under the sheet. Without them there were only folds.
‘He’s ready to dissolve into thin light air,’ I thought. The only movement was the occasional quiver of his body. The only sound was a slow and steady drip into his arm.
The bed was almost in the middle of the room. Beside it stood a chair and a little table. There was a tall lamp in the corner illuminating half the room. On one wall hung a framed copy of Kiprenksy’s portrait of Pushkin, and on the other, a large framed poster of Chagall’s White Crucifixion.
As I sat with him, I found that Vladimir slept most of the time, only occasionally interrupted by the few words Katya whispered in his ear. During the day sunlight flooded the room from the window near Pushkin’s portrait, and in the evening the soft light of dusk entered from a smaller window in the opposite wall. Even at night the curtains were never drawn.
‘He likes natural light and fresh air,’ Katya explained.
Now Katya went up to Vladimir, leaned down and murmured something in his ear. After a few seconds his eyes opened, his face turned in my direction and he smiled, and for a tiny moment I caught a glimpse of the face I had dreamed in the train.
I sat down, pulling the chair close to the bed, taking his hand and pressing it gently. There was little response. As I was about to withdraw it I felt a slight tightening of his grip and left it there. After a while his grip relaxed, reassured that my touch was real and that I wouldn’t desert him. Thought, I felt, was still living in his body and the disposition to feel joy and pleasure, and to give and receive them, hadn’t departed. I felt his grip tightening again and his arm moved slightly. I gazed into his face and found his eyes open, trying to reach me, and his lips quivering. Katya had crept in again and was indicating that Vladimir was trying to say something to me.
I leaned forward and heard the words: ‘Berlin … Rosa Luxemburg Platz Station …’
Vladimir was trying hard to speak but couldn’t get out any more words.
‘Why Berlin?’ I wanted to ask. But Katya had turned away, distressed by his desperate attempts to speak. I patted his hand, letting him know that I had heard him.
‘This coup won’t succeed.’ Shurik was certain of it.
‘Who knows?’ Tamrico wasn’t so sure.
‘The army can be so ruthless.’ Katya was frightened.
‘But most of them are conscripts: young, fresh and apprehensive. They won’t open fire on unarmed people.’
Shurik was adamant. ‘Civil war scares everyone.’
‘It didn’t eighty years ago,’ I said.
‘Then it was different. It was class war,’ he said. ‘Brother attacked brother. Now there are no classes, just poor and not-so-poor people.’
In the sitting room the television was left turned on at a low, hardly audible volume. Normal programmes had been suspended, replaced by ballets, operas and concerts.
At the end of the corridor, Yasya’s room was a mess. ‘Young boys and girls keep coming and going, excited about what’s going on in the streets,’ Katya told me. The kitchen was by far the noisiest room, with the radio on constantly. Every snippet of information was carefully analysed.
Yasya and his friends went out to the barricades near the White House, the Parliament building. They kept us informed about the events by calling us from a nearby hotel where one of Yasya’s friend worked as an accountant.
Shurik began to look worried. He had been to the White House several times, inspected the scene around Manezhnaya Square and talked to the soldiers in the tanks lined up ominously along Kalininsky Prospect. He had contacts in the KGB who could give him news from inside. What gave him confidence about the resistance was that the security forces, the army and the KGB were divided. Most soldiers hated the KGB, and it contained warring factions.
The most dangerous threat, he said, came from the Alpha Group of the KGB, a special unit of crack commandos. They had been involved in the January 1991 assault on a Lithuanian television station in Vilnius, resulting in at least fourteen civilians being killed. He had a friend who knew one of these commandos and who was desperately trying to reach him to discover their intentions.
Yasya told us that President Yeltsin had finally emerged from the White House, mounted a tank and given a rousing speech. He was accompanied by a retired colonel, which would have unsettled some of the soldiers. Yeltsin shook hands with one of them and joked: ‘I hope you aren’t going to shoot your President, young man.’
Yasya had been standing right next to the tank and had heard everything perfectly. ‘Yeltsin is brave, isn’t he?’ a woman in the crowd had said to her companion. ‘He’s brave because he’s drunk,’ her companion had laughed, ‘but only he, the Sibiryak (Siberian), can save us.’
‘He comes from Sverdlovsk,’ shouted someone else. ‘But does it matter?’
Yasya told them that he had pulled out a packet of gum from his pocket and offered it to a young soldier. ‘Not allowed,’ the soldier had told him, angrily. An old man standing nearby encouraged the soldier, but he wouldn’t yield, even though he was obviously hungry. Then a woman offered chocolate bars to other soldiers. One of them took a couple and hid them in his pocket.
‘Take this apple, please. It’s better than chocolates,’ a young woman with a red scarf said. She produced a couple of large and tempting apples, which also soon disappeared.
A soldier murmured to Yasya that they had been warned not to accept food from the huge crowd in front of the White House. Chocolates or biscuits could be poisoned, they were told.
‘These are fine, son,’ a man who could have been a retired soldier tried to reassure them.
‘That’s what they told us when we marched into Prague.’
‘But this is Moscow. Here we’re all are Russians, aren’t we?’
‘He won’t shoot me,’ a babushka standing under an umbrella said. ‘I’m a grandmother, just like his.’
‘Yes, she looks like you,’ the young soldier replied.
Every time Yasya phoned, Katya warned him to take care. ‘Keep yourself out of trouble, do you hear, away from trouble?’ she cautioned him. ‘Don’t bait the soldiers. They’re young and inexperienced and tense. Don’t irritate them. I want you back home safe and sound.’
‘Safe and sound,’ Yasya repeated each time.
The following evening I would meet Yasya and Lena, Shurik’s daughter, in front of the White House and stay there all night. Katya was in the kitchen. ‘The Vremya is on,’ I heard her calling. ‘Come and see what they’re showing.’ It was a short news report, but quite daring for the main news programme of the national channel. Yeltsin read a statement criticising the putsch. The camera moved away from him, showing the barricades near the White House. Commentary continued, interrupted by Yeltsin’s loud voice. Most intriguing were pictures from Leningrad, where a similar protest against the coup had begun.
‘Our darling Seriozha Medvedev will be in trouble,’ Tamrico said about a well-known newsreader.
‘And not only him,’ replied Katya. ‘What about the producer and the crew?’ She had worked for a few months with the producer’s wife.
‘Aren’t they brave to report? Now people at the barricades know that they’re not alone, that others care about them and will join them, tanks or no tanks.’
I wasn’t so sure. In Tiananmen Square in Beijing, not long ago, the world had watched as an unarmed young man had dared to confront a column of tanks. He had walked right up to the leading tank and, ignoring the huge gun pointed at him, begun talking to the soldiers.
He had escaped unharmed, but hundreds of other protestors had been crushed under the tanks or shot on that June night in 1989. Had they seen
that on Russian television?
‘No – and perhaps it’s just as well,’ Tamrico replied. ‘Imagine how that would have frightened people! But we all watched the attack on the television station in Vilnius. It was really scary.’
‘Yes, that was terrible,’ said Katya, ‘but Shurik thinks it shows how brutal power can be resisted. The best way to resist, he says, is to remain peaceful—’
‘Shurik sounds more and more like Gandhi these days,’ said Tamrico. ‘I’m not convinced. Fear can force people to do silly things. But Shurik believes that Russians are different, not as cruel and despotic as Asians. When I tell him that Gandhi was an Asian and that there is a bit of Asian in every Russian, and furthermore that his comments are racist, he just smiles. He won’t change his mind.’
I said nothing. What could I say? I was only too aware of the misery, deprivation and cruelty of India, not all of which could be attributed to poverty and colonial oppression. But I wasn’t about to agree that Asians were somehow naturally flawed. So I didn’t say a word.
My mind was troubled by two events unfolding simultaneously. On the streets a couple of kilometres from our house, a tense spectacle of life and death was playing itself out. Then in a tiny closed room nearby, one of my dearest friends was waiting to die.
‘What should I do?’ I thought. ‘Should I join Shurik, Yasya, Lena and the others at the barricades or should I go to the library and sit beside Vladimir? Should I grieve for my friend or go and witness history? What will happen? Will it end in bloodshed or will people at last show some real courage, step back and find a peaceful way to resolve the crisis?’
I spent most of the next night in the library with Vladimir. The doctor came and told us that the end was near.
‘We can stop the drip now,’ he said. ‘He has gone beyond pain and suffering. Morphine is useless now.’
‘Are you sure, Ivan Vasillivich?’ Katya said. ‘I can hear him moaning.’
‘That will soon stop,’ the doctor replied. ‘He’s now too weak to make a sound. I’ll come again in the morning. But don’t hesitate to call if you need me.’
When the drip was removed, all signs of movement disappeared and calmness descended on the room. The scene was set for Vladimir’s final exit. I found it hard to sit there. The room seemed to have transformed itself into a flat painting, expunged of time and place.
‘Have I stopped living too?’ I wondered.
Vladimir was clinging to life and when I looked carefully at him, I saw him move slightly. At the windows the curtains blew and we heard drops of rain against the window. Tiny puddles of water appeared on the floor. I got up to close the window and heard faint sounds of heavy trucks, the rumble of moving tanks and the muffled voices of the crowd outside.
Then I was alone in the room. I felt anxious. I had seen dead people before but had never experienced the exact moment of dying. ‘Does the last gasp of air empty the lungs and they collapse?’ I asked myself. ‘Is there a sound, a snort perhaps or a cry or just a soft noise like a damp firecracker unwilling to go bang? What sound does the spirit make when it escapes the body?’ For Hindus, it’s the prana, the breath, born from the mouth of Adipurusha, the primeval being. But is the prana the last breath? Does it leave the body to travel with the wind in search of some greater being? Earth to earth, as they say, ashes to ashes, dust to dust and nothing afterwards but endless wandering through the memories of those who have been left behind, until they themselves vanish.
I was glad that Katya didn’t leave me alone for long. Soon she came to sit with us and we waited in silence for death to leave the windowsill, step gently across the floor to Vladimir and, without waking him, take him away.
We both dozed. At around five o’clock next morning I woke to see Katya standing near the bed, speaking to Vladimir.
‘I had a dream,’ I said, ‘and I saw you with Yasya.’
‘I know. I heard you mumble in your sleep. But I too had a dream of Yasya and you.’
‘How strange,’ I said and began to describe my dream.
‘I saw Christ on the cross. His face was pale, paler than anything I have ever seen. His arms hung uselessly and in the middle of the palms of his hands were red spots of blood. His head was bound with a white scarf and around his hips was a white cloth with black stripes. It was so small, so inadequate, that I wanted to remove my shirt to cover his bruised legs. The wind ruffled his cloth very slightly and blew my hair which, to my great surprise, was long and red.
‘I was standing on the side of a hill and could see men and women sitting in a boat rowing with their bare hands. Behind them was a village on fire. Flames, bright red and yellow, reached the sky, mixed with clouds of smoke from burnt-out huts. I heard shouts, the footsteps of soldiers, then gunshots. I saw you walk past, your head covered in a blue scarf with silver spots, holding Yasya in your arms. His little head was resting on your shoulder. You looked at me as if I were a stranger and said: “Run away, my boy. The soldiers are coming.” But I didn’t run and you disappeared, walking slowly along the dirt track cutting across the slope.
‘No sooner had you gone than I heard Vladimir’s voice. I looked for him but couldn’t see him, even though his voice was all around me. I tried to listen carefully. “Minutes pass while I, Matthew the Levite, sit here on Mount Golgotha. And still he isn’t dead!” Then again: “The sun is setting and death hasn’t yet come.” Then there was a long pause, after which the voice came so close to me that I felt as if it were my own. “God! Why are you so angry with him? Ask death to come and take him away.”
‘The voice was lost in the wind, leaving me alone. Still I didn’t run. I waited and waited, confident that someone would come to tell me what I needed to know. He finally appeared. I recognised him immediately. He wore a green gown and cap and carried a sack on his right shoulder. “Get up and walk,” he said. “The Messiah has gone and the Cross has vanished. It’s time for you to get up and go too.”
‘I looked round and found that on the hill there was no one to be seen. Nothing but stones and dust and above them a completely empty sky. I felt sudden heartbreaking loneliness.’
‘But he is still here,’ said Katya.
We both approached the bed and listened. Vladimir was still breathing.
It took several days for me to make sense of the dream. After Vladimir’s funeral, when the room had been emptied and turned back into a studio, I got the chance to look properly at Chagall’s White Crucifixion. There I saw the pale figure on the cross, the people in the boat and the village on fire. I also saw the person in the green gown. Chagall described him as Ahasverus, the Wandering Jew. In the foreground of the painting was a woman in a scarf carrying a child in her arms. ‘I must have been looking at the painting just before I was overcome by sleep,’ I thought. Vladimir’s voice I could explain, but the words he had spoken mystified me.
Shurik told me: ‘Go and look at Chapter 16 of Book One of The Master and Margarita.’ I found the words in Bulgakov’s novel. They were the words of Matthew, the Levite.
The following evening I went outside to join the crowds at the White House.
I walked along Arbat Street, reached Smolensk Embankment and turned right to see the flimsy and hastily erected barricades which looked quite incapable of stopping tanks. At Smolensk Square, both on Kalininsky Prospect to my right and on Kutuzov Street to my left, I saw a long column of tanks surrounded by people holding umbrellas. If they were ordered to attack, I thought, and if they followed those orders, there would be utter chaos.
The square and streets close to the White House were lined with barricades. The material from nearby construction sites had been easy to pile up, but everyone knew that wire-mesh fencing, metal rods, wooden planks, tyres and blocks of concrete would at best only hinder tanks and would merely delay the final assault.
But resistance on the streets was spontaneous and carried its own simple logic: people would do what they could with bare hands and bodies, but would not attack first. Should t
he tanks advance, they would move aside. Their main aim was to shame the soldiers.
I decided to walk along Kalininsky Prospect looking for the clinic where twelve years before Anna and I had lost our baby. On the way I saw the cinema where I watched Solaris. I reached the cinema theatre and realised that I didn’t have the courage to go further. I turned back. Not far away was the wreckage of a trolleybus run over by a tank. Some young people were taking pieces of the wrecked bus and piling them in front of the barricades. Two girls of nine or ten stood on another tank and waved to the crowd. A boy with a lollipop protruding from his mouth slid up and down the barrel of its gun. Young men stood on other tanks holding up placards and posters.
Some tanks were draped in the Russian tricolour flag from pre-Soviet times. This juxtaposition of tanks, trucks and unarmed people swarming around them trying to domesticate them, to make them look friendly and less threatening, seemed bizarre.
A young soldier appeared out of a tank and began talking to a babushka who wanted to feed him pirozhki. People were loaded with bags containing whatever food they had found at home. Everyone felt that the soldiers had been on duty for hours without anything to eat or drink.
‘Keep them fed and entertained and they won’t shoot,’ said a woman near me. Others in the crowd said she was right.
At around seven that evening, I heard a huge roar from the edge of the crowd and saw people running in the direction of the Kalinin Bridge. The tanks also seemed to be moving.
‘They’re coming,’ someone shouted. All the soldiers disappeared inside their tanks. As they too began to roll, the crowd retreated.
‘It’s going to start,’ a man with a loudspeaker announced. I made my way towards the White House. I was delighted when I saw Shurik, Yasya and ten-year old Lena under a flimsy, plastic shelter.
‘Did you hear that the tanks are coming?’ I asked Shurik.
‘Yes, but it’s a false alarm. They’re not going to attack, at least not now,’ he said, with great certainty.
After Love Page 18