by David Szalay
The wedding party was held in the officers’ mess of the NKVD headquarters. General Reshetov sent flowers. Of Aleksandr’s family, only Ivan was there – a high-spirited seventeen-year-old wearing a suit for the first time. He and Nikita Stepanovich, who had just qualified as an engineer from the Urals State Technical University, were his witnesses.
They lived first with Irina’s parents. A fractious period, but one which time has endowed with a sort of purity, a prelapsarian shine. It was not until two years later that they moved into the flat on Malyshev Street – he is looking at a photo of Irina standing outside it, some time in the late thirties, shielding her eyes with her hand. Their room had a marble fireplace, the flue stuffed with old newspaper, and a long squat radiator under the window, which in winter emitted sullen heat and the smell of scorched paint. He sees them on their first night there, half-undressed in the laughable luxury of their own space; he is teaching her how to play chess – how to set out the pieces, how each piece moves, the significance of the king.
18
IT WAS – WHAT? A week, ten days, since you had left. It seemed like much longer. I lived through that terrible week moment by moment, and only as I drove out to the smoggy suburb did I understand what a torment it had been. A state of permanent enervation. There was no variation in it, only the same few thoughts and feelings, turning like a sluggish whirlpool. Eventually, there was nothing I would not do to escape it. Sleepless, undernourished, nearly losing my mind, I pushed the service Pobeda through the quagmire of autumn.
Nikita’s house was an odd thing, wasn’t it? A little low house surrounded, first, by a picket fence – within which there was that sad, sooty garden – and then by the huge structures of the steelworks. Towering smokestacks. Pipelines. Slag-heaps. Maybe it wasn’t quite like that. That’s how it is in my memory though.
Fine rain was falling that morning. The house was streaked with wet soot, and its windows were veiled with the stuff so that the light inside was dim and dirty. We stood in the parlour, in that light. There was no one else there. The family were all at work or school. I told you, for the umpteenth time, that nothing had happened, whatever Nikita might say. It was true that I still sometimes went to see her. She had written to me. She was lonely. I felt sorry for her. I went to see her. That was true … It was all very familiar.
And then I said something else. Something I had not envisaged saying. Not for a second. I said, ‘I think I might be in love with her.’
Silence.
Quiet pattering on smutty windowpanes.
It was a moment that would have been unimaginable only a few months earlier. I think you were shocked. Though you had never accepted my protestations of innocence, I suppose you had hoped they were true. And they were. That was the point.
You sighed – a spontaneous open-mouthed sigh, almost a sob – and there was another of those long silences, in the middle of which the lifeless objects of the parlour – the maid’s mattress, the table, the black iron taps – seemed to take on a more intense existence. There were moments when I was intensely aware of them, and moments when I was not aware of them at all, as if we were standing in a pale void. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
Suddenly you shouted, ‘Why do you think you can come here and talk to me like this?’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry …’
‘Stop saying that!’ You were in tears now, shouting at me. I’ve forgotten what you said. I was in shock too, wondering what I had done. Words are deeds. And then you were wiping your eyes and saying, ‘I think you should leave now.’
‘Irina …’
‘Please, leave.’
With trembling hands I started the Pobeda, and spent the next hour taking wrong turnings, not knowing where I was, more and more lost in that smoking volcanic landscape. I don’t know how I spent the next ten hours. I met Zalesky on the stairs in the twilight. He was on his way out. ‘You alright?’ he said, looking worriedly into my tear-stained eyes, which he would not have been able to see very well in the murky light.
I tried to smile. ‘Yes. Fine. You?’ He was in uniform. ‘Working nights?’
‘The whole week,’ he said. ‘It’s messing me up.’
‘Well …’ I did not know what to say. I felt no sympathy for him. ‘You’ll get a few days off at the end of it.’
‘Yeah, just when I’ve got used to it.’
I went upstairs and lay on the divan for a while.
Then I went out again.
Irishka, I want to tell you something now. Something that has weighed on my mind all these years. It’s important that I tell you. That evening I went to see her. It was as if a sort of darkness had opened in front of me. I don’t know how else to put it.
I went to see her. ‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said, when she opened the door. Her face was swollen. She had been asleep. She was not expecting me. I slumped down on the sofa, still in my wet coat.
‘You look upset,’ she said.
‘I am.’
‘Why?’
I did not tell her about our meeting. I never told her much about us.
She went to the kitchen. While she was away I listened to the rain on the window, or something like that. The food was from the ministry store. I said I didn’t want any. Instead, I quoted Hamlet, the original bourgeois nihilist! I said, ‘How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world!’ She knew the lines – knew them so well in fact that she joined in from ‘seem to me all the uses of this world!’ You would have laughed at us, Irishka. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me,’ I said, laughing. ‘That I feel like Hamlet. It’s shameful.’
It was late. The electric light sank to an orange glow and then went out. I was still there, on the sofa, and the rain was still siling down in the street, so she said, ‘Do you want to stay the night?’ I had never stayed the night until then. No, I had not. Every night since you went to Nikita’s, I had slept, or not slept, on my own on our divan.
‘Well …’ I said.
‘You can sleep on the sofa,’ said her voice in the dark.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Of course.’
‘Well …’ I sounded doubtful.
‘You’ll get soaked.’
‘Yes. Okay. Thank you.’
I was slowly unlacing my shoes, when she said, ‘Did you look at my journal?’
‘No.’
‘None of it?’
‘No.’
I took off my shoes.
‘I wrote some terrible things in it,’ she said.
‘Did you?’
‘Yes.’
I did not know what to say. Finally I just said, ‘‘night,’ and lay down on the sofa with my overcoat on top of me.
It was totally dark. For a few minutes I heard her moving around, undressing, then the soft squeak of the bedsprings, then only the sounds of the rain. It seemed that nothing would happen that night – and if nothing happened that night, it seemed unlikely that it ever would. I was pleased. Truly. All the stress of the previous few hours – of the previous few weeks – immediately sank away, like water out of a sink. I was exhausted. I just wanted to sleep. And I did sleep, though the sofa was lumpy.
Irishka, I woke to find her sitting there with her hip pressing against my leg. She seemed to be sitting sideways, looking down at me. The rain had stopped. The silence was intense. For a few moments I did not know where I was. I had been dreaming something, and seemed suddenly to have woken. I don’t know how long she had been sitting there, or how long I had been asleep.
‘I know you looked at it,’ she whispered.
Somehow, in the otherwise total disorientation of waking, I immediately knew what she was talking about. ‘Yes, I did,’ I said.
‘I know. And you don’t hate me for it?’
It took me a moment to understand that this was a question. ‘No.’
For what seemed like a long time she sat there in silence. It was too dark for me to see her
face. Then she leaned towards me and kissed me on the forehead. As soon as she had done this, she stood up and a second later I heard the squeak of the bedsprings.
Only then did it occur to me that she might have expected a warmer welcome, perched on the sofa in the middle of the night, with her hip or thigh pressing against my leg. She had sat there, it now struck me, for several minutes, as if waiting for something, and I had not moved. Maybe you will smile at this, Irishka. Please smile at it! Even when she leaned down and kissed my forehead, and her falling hair tickled my face, I had not so much as moved.
Making no effort to be quiet – quite the opposite – I pulled myself into a sitting position, and for a minute or two I sat there, as she had, on the edge of the sofa. Then, stepping slowly through the darkness, I went and stood over her. I stood there for a long time, listening to the silence, which seemed to paralyse me. It was as if I might have stood there forever. ‘Are you asleep?’ I said finally. She said nothing, and did not move. ‘Nadya?’ When she still said nothing, still did not move, I put out my hand. I was further from the bed than I had thought.
I want to tell you everything, and I will. As soon as I touched her, on the shoulder I think, she sat up violently. I thought she was going to hit me, until the unexpected presence of her tongue in my mouth made me think otherwise. I toppled over and lay on the floor underneath her. That went on for a few minutes. Then quite suddenly, it stopped. She stood up and pulled her nightdress over her head. Then, while she waited, I undressed – there was some precarious hopping as I took my trousers off, some fiddling with stubborn shirt buttons. I’m sorry to say I did not take off my socks – I thought I had kept her waiting long enough – and wearing only those not very fresh socks, with my hands I found her in the dark. And there was a surprising lot of her to find. She was a tall woman, and I was used to your small limbs.
You should laugh at what follows, Irishka. The slightest movement on that mattress produced a loud squeaking of the springs, and the walls were thin. We struggled to stay quiet. It wasn’t possible of course. We even fell off the bed and landed on the floor with a thud that must have woken the whole flat. For a while, we tried to press on as though nothing had happened, until eventually she whispered, ‘Wait!’ and we stopped, and stood up, and felt our way wearily back onto the mattress, which sagged like a hammock.
In the morning it was snowing. The first snow of autumn. Huge flakes like white hens’ feathers silently filling the windless air. The snow increased the strangeness of the situation, the strangeness of the warmth of another woman. Until then I had known only you. Watching it fall, I thought of you – thought of the same snow falling where you were – of you watching it fall. I did not understand what had happened. I turned from the window and saw that she had woken up. Lying on the bed under a single sheet, she was watching me. The snow-light made soft pale shadows. With a strange sort of shyness, she wrapped herself in the sheet and took the few steps to the table for her cigarettes. Later I dressed while she made tea. We sat in silence, drinking it. Outside the falling snowflakes were smaller and flurrying. When the tea was finished, I left.
I did not see you that day, as I had said I would. For a week I was not able to face you. That was when the final estrangement took place. Then there was only logistics. The work of taking things apart. A week or two later, you and Nikita turned up one morning in a truck, splashing through the flooded potholes of Malyshev Street. I suspect it was Nikita who insisted that you take everything. When it was finished, he left, wiping his hands, sweating in his shirt. You were still taking a last look, making sure nothing had been forgotten, or perhaps just lingering in the room where you had lived for so many years. Places like that are transfigured when you know you are leaving them for the last time. For a moment, they seem new again.
We went down the stairs in silence. On the landing you stopped. ‘Irina …’ I said. I see your face now, my love – one side of it in shadow, the other in the light from the window, lined with tears. They weren’t for me. I know what they were for. They were for the memory of a dead idea. We had lost faith in the idea of our life together. Unfortunately, Irishka, the process of losing faith in something, once it has started, is not easy to stop. Perhaps only a major sacrifice will do it. A sacrifice is always a sort of assertion. You wiped the tears impatiently from your face. It was the last time we were alone together, on the landing, in the wet-plaster smell of the stairwell, next to the window which overlooked the yard. ‘It’s okay,’ you said, and we went down the last flight of stairs and out into the street.
When I went up on my own – my legs were trembling – it seemed strange that only a few minutes earlier you had been standing there, on the landing, wiping your eyes. And now that was over.
19
FOR THE NEXT two weeks, when he finished work, he walked to Karl Libknekht Street through the shortening twilight and looked up at the light in the second-floor window. In the morning, he shaved with icy water – more and more of his things were migrating from Malyshev Street – peering at himself in the speckled mirror. Then put on his shoes and left for work.
Lozovsky was mentioned only once in those weeks, when his wife suddenly said, ‘Do you feel sorry for Mikhail?’ They were in bed. It was early evening. It surprised him that she should mention her husband in such an offhand way. ‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Why?’
‘I liked him.’
‘Did you?’ She seemed surprised. ‘Why?’
‘Why these questions?’
‘I just want to know.’
‘I don’t know why.’
Her next question, a minute or two later, was ‘Did you like me the first time you saw me?’
‘Yes.’
‘When was the first time you saw me?’
It would have been the first night he spent at Metelyev Log. His memories of that night? His shoes were soaked through. The interior of the house smelled of wax polish, of kerosene – warm, oily smells. The milky hoods of the lamps looked like huge luminous mushrooms. The floor sounded hollow under his feet. However, he had no memory of her from that night.
‘So you didn’t like me the first time you saw me,’ she said, with a laugh, when he told her this.
‘I don’t know. Maybe not the very first.’
‘You liked me then though, when we met at Metelyev Log?’
‘Yes.’
‘You didn’t seem to.’ Though he was facing away from her, he was able to hear the smile in her voice. She put her hand forcefully through his hair and pulled it.
‘Didn’t I?’
‘No, you didn’t. You’re very secretive, aren’t you?’
He told her that when he got back from Metelyev Log, that first time, he had seen a Komsomol poster in Sverdlovsk station, a huge poster hanging half-hidden in darkness. It showed a rosy-cheeked young woman, wearing heavy workers’ clothes, a mauve headscarf and an expression of exquisite stoicism as she trowelled mortar onto the brick that she was holding in her mittened hand. The woman in the poster looked quite like her, he said – more than that, there was about her a placid stillness very like the first misleading impression she herself had made on him (her china-blue eyes cow-like in their clouded placidity when she looked up from the page to see her husband and the Chekist enter the house) and he had fallen asleep that night thinking of her, and of the woman in the poster, the two of them merging together in his mind, so much so that when he next saw her, a few months later, he was surprised how different they were. She laughed. ‘Were you disappointed?’ she said.
Was he disappointed?
Perhaps ‘disappointed’ was too strong a word.
‘No,’ he said.
‘I’m sure you were. And what about your wife?’ she said. ‘Did you like her the first time you saw her?’
He said he had no memory of the first time he had seen her. She would have been very young.
‘How young?’
‘Twelve, I suppose.’
‘And how old were
you?’
‘Um …’ For a second he seemed not to understand the question. Then he said, ‘The same age.’
*
One afternoon Mikhalkov summoned him to his office. Mikhalkov had started to smoke a pipe, a substantial black object. When Aleksandr sat down, it had extinguished itself, and he sat there waiting while Mikhalkov huffed and puffed and struck matches. ‘Where have you been?’ Mikhalkov said eventually, with his teeth on its stem. ‘I’ve been trying to get hold of you all day.’
‘I went to see Yudin.’
Mikhalkov himself had told him to do this.
‘Oh yes? How is he?’
‘He’s the same. The same as he was.’
Puffing with the focused urgency of a doctor losing a patient, Mikhalkov said nothing for a few seconds. ‘The same, eh?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh well.’
That morning, more through luck than judgement – it was not easy to find people on those nameless tracks, in those unnumbered huts – he had found the place where Yudin lived with his mother. When he got out of the Pobeda, the stench was over-powering. There was an open sewer nearby. It was so sickening that he was tempted to hold his handkerchief over his nose. He did not. There were some people there, watching him. The wind fussed with various scraps of flapping jetsam, and tugged at some wire fencing with a monotonous tinging sound. The interior of the hut had its own unpleasant odour. Near the entrance was a space where newspapers were pinned on the wall, and there were some tattered books. Then the soiled sheets on strings and other makeshift partitions started – the hut was home to several dozen people, though in the middle of the day very few of them were there. Moving through these subdivisions, shoving them aside in light the colour of cobwebs, he stumbled on Yudin. For a second he was stunned – Yudin was sitting on the floor and seemed to be putting together some sort of small kerosene stove. ‘He wants to help,’ his mother said. ‘When he’s tried I’ll do it.’ And he saw that Yudin showed no sign of even knowing what the pieces of the stove were, and had no hope of successfully putting them together.