The system continued to exact its toll. People were afraid of memories, of insights, knowing these might drag them into a bottomless pit, twist their own lives out of all recognition, and all of this could cause self-loathing to swell to immeasurable proportions. Besides, where was all this wretched truth-telling heading?
When the security forces rallied to oppose the students — the same security forces who a few years earlier had fought to oppose this truth — it became clear that the truth would be a hollow one, without serious consequences. Perhaps a few restrictions would be eased, a few bullet holes revealed through which it might be possible to see one’s life from a different perspective: but who actually wanted to do that? What could you do with this view of things, other than subordinate yourself to this truth until it buried you beneath it?
The indescribable always builds a defensive wall around the describable, Brilka.
The Central Committee had started to announce an audacious turnaround, which was to go down in history as the ‘Khrushchev Thaw’. I believe that this point in the history of the Soviet Union was a singular moment, one that would never come again — and, just as singularly, nobody took advantage of it. People opted for the old way of doing things. They could have bolstered Khrushchev’s ego, let him play the hero and liberator a while longer; they should have expected those in power to show remorse and penitence for longer, and perhaps it really would have brought about viable reform. Reform that would have actually taken root, not the ridiculous prohibitions that masqueraded as reform.
Press censorship was eased, previously banned books were printed, the powers of security officials were curtailed, torture was outlawed, music that prior to this had not been heard anywhere was played, the silent were granted a voice. Gulags were closed, political prisoners released, hundreds of thousands of people acquitted. New residential zones were built; many people moved out of the seedy kommunalkas and got their own bathrooms, toilets, kitchens, things that had been an inconceivable luxury until then. People acquired a little privacy. And they showed gratitude for the little morsels of freedom they were thrown.
But the steps towards freedom were strictly numbered. For power always proves sweeter than revenge. And the further the 20th Party Congress retreated into the mists of the past, the sweeter the temptation became to demonstrate that power again, to let it shine once more.
When the wave of uprisings reached Eastern Europe and Hungarian students took to the streets in collective rebellion and a public expression of anger, the authorities reverted to the old ways, and blood began to flow all over again.
The Party feared a loss of control. The priority now was to take things firmly in hand. Threats were made, the army sent in, and all those who had believed in reform and run out onto the street were swiftly brought to heel. And ‘peace’ returned to this vast empire once more.
*
Nana and Elene travelled to the ‘cold sea’ in the north — this was how Nana would always describe any sea that wasn’t the Black one. She had never been here before; it was the first time she had visited Kostya’s world. She arrived at her husband’s apartment, which, she discovered, was in an attractive old building and sparsely but tastefully furnished. She enjoyed the long walks along the promenade, the view of the harbour late in the evening. She marvelled at the raspberry and blueberry bushes that lined the country roads when they took Kostya’s Volga and drove out of the city to spend the weekend at one of his friends’ dachas or enjoy the heat of a Russian sauna. She enjoyed the classical concerts in Kislovodsk, where they spent a long weekend taking the health-giving waters.
She enjoyed the opportunities and prestige that came with her husband’s high rank, as well as his undivided attention, his presents, the quiet evenings — rare, but all the more precious for it — spent together in the apartment, the breakfasts and dinners they ate together. She enjoyed the care he bestowed on Elene, his delight in her, for Kostya proved a besotted father, bursting with pride in his lively, chubby-cheeked daughter, and full of loving feelings for her. Nana kept asking herself whether these evenings with just the three of them, these long walks beside the sea, constituted happiness; whether this was what love felt like.
She took great pains to be a good wife, and to rein in her secret resentment of Stasia’s and Christine’s unworldliness. She did this out of respect for her husband; and she wanted to be a good mother to Elene, one who set clearly defined boundaries and rules, and paid her enough attention. Although she found it difficult, she even tried to show an interest in her husband’s work.
But something had come over her since Elene’s birth, something melancholy and leaden that seemed entirely out of character for her. Since becoming a member of this family and living with her idiosyncratic mother-in-law and her sister, she had been afflicted by this strange heaviness, and she didn’t like it. She barely recognised herself.
Kostya was certainly a good husband; at least, that was what everyone around her said. He never insisted on things, had even bowed to her will and let her stay in their homeland, had not summoned her to join him in this foreign place, although he would have been well within his rights to do so. He enabled her to have a good life, he was attentive, gallant, he was a wonderful father — and yet there were days, when Kostya was at work at the port authority or busy on one of the freighters, when she felt as if she were paralysed, oddly apathetic, as if this family had drained all her resistance, as if between the two peculiar, unworldly sisters she had voluntarily surrendered responsibility for her own life. Sometimes her endeavours seemed to her to be futile: her pursuit of order, clarity, her yearning for clear structures.
*
‘You never talk about the past, Kostya. Why not? Nor do your mother and your aunt. I know so little about you all. I found a box of old photos in the attic recently. You don’t even have a proper family album. It’s strange.’
They were walking along the beach on a quiet afternoon. Kostya smiled at Elene, who was drawing shapes in the wet sand and so totally engrossed in what she was doing that their conversation passed her by.
‘She is very pretty. A colleague we met at lunch yesterday kept saying so. Don’t you think so, too? That Elene is a remarkably pretty child?’ he asked, instead of responding to her question.
‘You see, you always change the subject, all of you. It’s like a family tradition.’
‘What is it you want to know? Just ask me.’ Kostya was irritated.
‘Are you actually happy? I don’t even know if you’re happy, for example. With me.’
‘You don’t ask something like that, Nana. You can just tell.’
‘But you’re always so … hmm … self-controlled.’
‘Aren’t you?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You don’t know?’
‘No.’
‘That sounds rather naive. You do know that, don’t you?’
‘Well, then it’s naive; my God, I don’t know that. I don’t know what that is.’
‘You see? The problem you accuse others of having is the problem you have with yourself. You’re the discontented one. I don’t stop you from doing anything, I don’t restrict you, do I? Do I?’
‘No.’
‘So ask yourself why that is. We have an adorable daughter, we have a good life, we —’
‘Yes, I know. You’re right. I’m sorry.’
Just at that moment, Elene, who had drawn a round face with a wide mouth and two dots for eyes and had added a mass of curls, cried out ecstatically: ‘Kitty!’
Both Kostya and Nana abruptly fell silent. They went over to their daughter, who was pointing at her artwork, full of excitement and pride, looking up at her parents expectantly, waiting for their approval.
‘Where has she got that from?’ Kostya looked at his wife, who shook her head in bewilderment. ‘She must have got it from someone. Did you talk about her —
at home, I mean? You know that’s not good. And my mother should know it best of all. In any case, I’ve asked you all repeatedly to make sure that this subject —’
‘I have never talked to her about your sister.’
‘She can’t just have made it up, can she?’
‘Elene, my darling …’ Nana bent down to her daughter. ‘Who is that? Tell Mama again. Who is that in your picture?’
And Elene, very pleased with herself, repeated the same name over and over again: ‘Kitty. Kitty. Kitty.’
*
That night, the couple lay in their heavy oak bed without speaking. Kostya had turned to face the wall, and Nana kept her eyes closed in the hope that she would be able to shake off all her questions and confusion. Finally, she couldn’t stand it any more; she sat up in bed and turned on a little bedside lamp.
‘Where is she? You know where she is.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Yes, you do. You got her out of the country. Tell me.’
‘I don’t know, and now please stop asking, I don’t want you to talk about this subject in front of my daughter. Do you understand me?’ There was an iciness in his voice, something Nana had never heard from him before, that brooked no contradiction.
‘What did she do? What did she do to you?’
‘Stop it, I said!’
He shouted so loudly that Nana flinched and put her hands over her ears. Her husband had never shouted at her like that. Nana started to feel frightened. She was frightened of the man who shared her bed, who had fathered a child with her in the dark one night, and who, in all the nights of love that followed, had never made a single sound. She was afraid of the silence that surrounded her, and of her own ever-increasing sense of powerlessness.
‘What on earth’s the matter?’ Nana asked quietly, after a pause. She got up, went round, and perched on his side of the bed.
‘I don’t like to look back.’
‘But Kostya, you can’t live like that.’
‘You have to. There’s no point in doing anything else.’
Nana, confused and out of her depth, flung her arms around her husband’s neck, hoping to soften him with her tenderness. He relented, let her kiss him and hold him tight, then finally lay on top of his soft wife, who had become a little plumper, rounder, more yielding, since the birth of her daughter; who smelled of raisins and fresh bread; whose hair hung down to her waist. His wife, lying beneath him, still young, radiant, full of life, and now full of questions, too. He pulled up her nightdress; his other hand reached out to the chest beside the bed, and he turned off the bedside lamp, as he always did when he was about to make love to her.
‘Leave the light on,’ whispered Nana — and received a very clear, loud ‘No’ in reply. She did not object. He moved his hand up her body, caressing her belly, her breasts, her neck; as always when they slept together, he seemed rather distant, rather brisk, rather absent. Before, she had accepted this sort of intimacy as something normal, natural; she had believed that this was how it was supposed to be. After all, she had nothing to compare it with. But Nana was intuitive enough to realise, as time went by, that making love had to be about more than just her husband’s quick movements, which were almost like an assault; more than this act that always followed the same pattern; more than just wordlessness.
She pushed him off and climbed on top of him, gently removed his hand from her back and began to kiss his taut, strong body from head to foot. She felt her way, exploring every inch of his skin, every tiny mark, every slight curve, every little imperfection, every mole and every hollow. She hoped that lust would draw out his secrets; that this sensation, which suddenly overcame her more strongly than ever before, would soften him, too. She so wanted these answers from him; she so wanted, this night, truly to get to know him, truly to see him, to be able to see deeper and deeper inside him. She wanted this so much, for him at last to forget his iron discipline, his reticence and self-control, and for them to embark together in search of the unknown, to forge new paths. He must be able to break free of himself for once, to reveal what he was hiding; he must be able, at least once, to forget himself in her arms!
She struggled on, searching for the spots that would make him more accessible to her. And for a while she seemed to be on the right track: he did not resist her. He let himself be explored, breathed heavily; he closed his eyes, grabbed at her, unthinking. She conquered her shame — an unspoken thing, but one that set such firm boundaries — and raised herself up over his body. Something inside was telling her that he was familiar with this kind of passion, this lack of restraint. And at the same time the realisation frightened her, because she sensed how little this lack of inhibition had to do with her. Kostya, his eyes squeezed tightly shut, was revealing his lust to his wife; but she was just the proxy for another, and Nana wished she had never gone down this path, because now there was no going back, now there was nowhere to hide from the realisation of this night — the thing she had so cruelly and unerringly revealed to herself, which was that her husband’s love did not belong to her.
Nana understood then that, deep within himself, he was incapable of forgetting, that he clung desperately to every single memory of his past, and this was precisely the reason he was constantly demanding that it be forgotten. It would take a while longer for her to discover that he was restless, restlessly seeking a point between the sea and the horizon where a meeting of past and present might be possible; and that the impossibility of ever reaching it drove him into the soft arms of countless beautiful, perfumed women.
After that night in the port city, it would no longer matter to her very much.
She would feel a sense of regret, a slight, stabbing pain, but she would no longer be capable of getting seriously upset about it, or doing anything to stop it. By then she would already have accepted indifference towards certain things as a permanent part of her life. And soon she would construct a carapace around herself, in the literal, physical sense: because on her return to her homeland from the ‘cold sea’, Nana began to put on weight — little by little, almost unnoticeably — until her circumference was such that it could wall in all her feelings.
*
Thanks to Amy’s influential friends, Kitty succeeded in obtaining a residence permit, and then a valid work permit, more quickly than expected. Her audience at the jazz club was steadily growing, and Amy ran a tireless propaganda campaign on her protégée’s behalf. Other clubs put in requests for this socialist insider tip. Soon Kitty was earning enough money to pay Amy some rent — well below what she could have asked for the flat, but it salved Kitty’s wounded pride. After the arid Prague years, these were the years when Kitty’s music blossomed. She composed and sang, let Amy put her lyrics into English, and eventually she even signed a contract with her benefactor. From then on, Amy was Kitty’s manager, and keen to ensure that she would soon have her own record deal. Amy never tired of telling her fellow countrymen how great it was to help a talented, freedom-loving refugee from the enemy camp and provide her with the right opportunities. She put her organisational talent to work, and planned Kitty’s career meticulously.
Kitty herself was simply happy have such good fortune, and so many well-disposed people around her, to be able to make music and even earn money doing it. She expected no more of her future, and viewed Amy’s ambitious efforts to make her a star with scepticism. However, she realised with regret that she missed the voice terribly, for their phone calls had become less frequent: she was no longer dependent on him to help her. They spoke only about essentials; he assured her that her family was well, told her about the general political situation in her homeland, and — as usual — nothing about himself.
Amy had grown accustomed to these phone calls; she asked no questions when Kitty retired to her room to hold a conversation in her mother tongue. At first it had bothered her, partly because Kitty wouldn’t give her any explanation
for these calls, but she had now come to accept these conversations as an integral part of Kitty’s past, which was in any case off limits. In the meantime, Amy had often heard Kitty tell varying and contradictory anecdotes, and had realised how Kitty protected herself. She never spoke of the real reasons for her flight, and, if she talked about her family, it was only very sporadically. Besides, after these phone calls, Kitty was usually in a good mood and immediately started composing, which, after all, also benefited Amy.
On this particular evening, Kitty was sitting expectantly beside the phone. He never missed an appointment, and she loved that about him — his reliability. She had made herself a gin and tonic, and was waiting for the soft, soothing, so familiar voice. Sometimes she would picture his face; she imagined a tall, confident man with delicate features and thick, wavy hair. This voice deserved to have a body that matched.
‘I’m so pleased you’ve called!’ She wished she could address him informally, by name. ‘Seven o’clock on the dot. I love your punctuality.’
‘I’m pleased to hear your voice, too.’
She sensed slight embarrassment at the other end of the line.
‘Will you go on calling me?’
‘But I am calling you.’
‘Even if you don’t have to any more?’
‘If you like.’
‘I do like. I worry that you’ll stop.’
‘I will always call you, for as long as you need me.’
The Eighth Life Page 48