Echoes of a Life

by Robin Byron

  Descending now down the long escalator into the Krasnopresnenskaya metro station, Marianne was brought back to the present by the Alice in Wonderland feeling which going down into the Moscow underground always aroused in her. Despite several visits to Moscow as a tourist, and the three months which she had now spent living in Moscow with Edward, she still could not get used to the sheer ostentation compared to the grimness and drab conformity of so much of 1970s Moscow. Huge rectangular pillars of red granite and white marble rose from the polished stone floor, creating graceful arches supporting domed ceilings; it was as if some team of architects had been briefed to convert the vaults of a medieval cathedral into a casino or five-star hotel.

  Down in this subterranean fantasy land Marianne let her thoughts return to Daniel. Nothing more is said between her and Betsy that night after her long clinch, although Marianne receives some curious looks from her best friend. The following day Daniel behaves quite normally until late in the afternoon when, to the whole family’s surprise, he starts a campaign to persuade Betsy that she owes a courtesy visit to Martha, a girl with whom she has spent time on previous vacations in the absence of any other friends of her own age. Betsy’s mother comes down on Daniel’s side: ‘I think Danny is right,’ she says. ‘Just because you have Marianne staying with you doesn’t mean you can completely ignore Martha.’

  Grumpily, and with a long death stare at Marianne, Betsy allows herself to be driven off by Daniel to visit Martha. Having dropped her off, he returns to the house where Marianne has positioned herself – as she later acknowledges – so that Daniel will notice her as soon as he comes through the door.

  Smiling when he sees her, with a look which is surprisingly diffident, he proposes a walk to the beach and they set off side by side in silence – if it could be called silence in Marianne’s case, given the thunderous noise her heart makes as it pounds through her ears. It’s a moist and breezy afternoon and she can taste the salt spray on the wind which is blowing her hair in damp strands across her face. Once they are out of sight of the house it seems natural, inevitable even, when he pulls her towards him and kisses her. It’s not the first time she has been kissed by a boy but there is a difference this time: there’s a confidence about Daniel – an assurance which allows her a freedom of response she has not experienced before. He takes her hand and they walk on towards the cove; several times he stops and kisses her again. Will he speak to her? It seems not – and she is too nervous to say anything herself.

  In the days following their cliff walk, Daniel becomes more talkative and she becomes more confident of her status in his eyes – albeit a status not to be acknowledged or referred to in front of the rest of his family.

  ‘My Marylou…’ he calls her.

  ‘Who’s Marylou?’ she asks.

  ‘Just a character in a book I’m reading – a sixteen-year-old girl. But I guess that’s kind of unfair. You’re really no way like her.’

  ‘What’s the book about?’

  ‘It’s just a couple of guys travelling around the country and it’s what I’m going to do when I’ve finished college. Me and Randy, we’re just going to drive around for a year – to the west coast, maybe down to Mexico.’

  ‘What about your dad’s business? Aren’t you supposed to be starting there as soon as you’ve finished college?’

  ‘That’s his theory. But it’s not what I’m planning…’

  Marianne divulges some of her secrets; she tells him that she was born in France during the last year of the war and that she doesn’t know who her biological father was because her mother won’t talk about it, but she thinks he might have been German. She tells him about the bad dream which she still sometimes has which is hardly a dream at all, more a sensation, a sudden waking with her heart pounding – a glimpse of a mysterious face before it disappears – and a sense that something terrible has happened. He kisses her and tells her that when she can sleep with him she won’t have bad dreams anymore.

  The closer that Marianne gets to Daniel that summer the more outraged Betsy becomes. ‘I thought you were my friend,’ she says.

  ‘Of course I’m your friend – we’re best friends, aren’t we?’

  ‘How can we be best friends now when you’re behaving like a goddamn little slut with my brother?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sniffing round Danny like some underage tramp.’

  ‘Come on? What’s your problem? Just coz Dan likes me…’

  ‘Can’t you see how ridiculous you’re being? Danny’s twenty-one – you’re not even fifteen – what does he want with a girl like you?’

  What indeed does he want with me, Marianne wonders, since Daniel repeatedly tells her how much he respects her, how she is too young to go all the way and he will wait at least until she is sixteen? She knows, though, that she will do anything he asks and when he does ask for something she doesn’t hesitate to comply.

  ‘You have to do this for me,’ he says, taking her hand and putting it down his pants. Timidly at first, she touches him, then puts her fingers around him, feeling him bone hard but not knowing what to do next; she looks up into his muddy-green eyes which seem to be focused somewhere out to sea. He holds her wrist and moves himself against her. A few seconds later she knows something has happened when he gives a groan and she feels her hand wet and slippery against his flesh.

  In the remaining weeks of their vacation, Marianne spends as much time as she can with Daniel. Sometimes it is in his room, Daniel bribing Betsy – or is it threatening, Marianne is never quite sure – to keep her out of the way. Daniel lies on his bed smoking while they listen to music. Marianne sits close to him, but on the floor – nothing too physical can take place in the house in case they are interrupted. More often though, they escape to the cliffs where a grassy ledge hidden behind some bushes provides a degree of privacy. Between bouts of kissing and heavy petting, Daniel reads Marianne passages from novels or poems which he thinks she will like and, fascinated by her ability to speak fluent French, he makes her read extracts from a French novel left over at their holiday house by some previous occupant, even though he can understand barely a word. Sometimes she teaches him phrases in French and laughs at his clumsy pronunciation; then he laughs at himself and blows smoke in her face until she grabs his cigarette and throws it down the cliff.

  As each day passes she feels his deepening attachment to her. He tells her that he loves her and, believing it to be true, she loves him back with all the fierce certainty that a million years of evolution have programmed into the first flowering of adolescent passion. And so together they spend those few short weeks, reading about the past and talking of the future, pledging their enduring love and existing only for each other in the fantasy of their imagined world, in their bubble of erotic adventure, in their kingdom by the sea.

  The train doors were opening and Marianne was jolted back to the present. As she emerged onto the platform she was confronted by a giant poster: a majestic soldier in a greatcoat, carrying under one arm a small child, was slashing with his enormous sword at the Hydra-like beast of the Soviet enemies: in giant letters of the Cyrillic script, the poster screamed ‘DON’T FORGET THE LESSONS OF HISTORY’ as the sword severed the serpent heads of ‘revanchism, espionage and anticommunism’. Ah yes, she thought, that’s what he was sent to fight, communism – the cancer of world-wide communism – keeping the world safe for democracy. He was twenty-six when he was drafted into the army and he was twenty-eight – the same age as I am now – when his luck ran out in some blood-filled ditch of the Vietnam slaughterhouse.

  3

  ‘You had a letter?’ said Edward, as he poured coffee into two red-and-white-striped mugs and passed one across to Marianne.

  ‘Yes, it was that invitation I told you about. From this guy Larry, at the embassy. It’s some sort of dinner he’s holding.’

  ‘I suppose it will be a hundred per cent Amer
icans?’

  ‘Not quite, as long as you come with me,’ she said, blowing him a kiss. ‘And anyway, us Americans are not so bad, are we?’

  ‘Hmm… and by the way, I counted eleven cockroaches in the kitchen this morning.’

  ‘Oh dear. Is that a record?’

  ‘Probably not. Anyway, I’m off now. Is Izzy still asleep?’

  ‘Yes, don’t wake her. A bad night, if you remember – and hey, give me a kiss – I know I got you into this and it’s hard for you but you’ll look back on it as a worthwhile experience in years to come.’

  I doubt whether he will, thought Marianne, as she watched the door of the apartment close behind her husband. For her, these three years in Moscow would be an important stage in her academic career, enabling her to complete her PhD and improve her chances of a good job back in England. She also enjoyed the few English classes which she taught. For Edward, having spent nearly two years in high-powered medical research, this was a career siding: teaching anatomy to foreign English-speaking medical students and helping in the general surgical wards. Sometimes she felt guilty for dragging him to Moscow. Not for the first time in their five years of marriage, Marianne was conscious that she should be careful not to exploit Edward’s good nature. His gentle demeanour and English politeness would always tend to mask genuine unhappiness.

  She could still hear the muffled sound of Procol Harum’s ‘Whiter Shade of Pale’ coming through the thin wall of her temporary lodgings in London where she stayed when she first arrived in England. It was 1967, and her fellow graduates from Cornell were heading west to Haight Ashbury for the summer of love, whereas she headed east to England to study French and Russian literature at Cambridge.

  Life in Cambridge was an idyllic bubble away from the constant drumbeat of conscription and the Vietnam war and she went a little mad, smoking dope, drinking too much, forgetting to take her pill and ending up pregnant before the end of her first year.

  The father was Edward, a graduate of Pembroke College and at that time a junior registrar at Addenbrooke’s Hospital. Edward wanted to marry her and she agreed. They went over to her parents’ home in Vermont and were married in August; Isabelle was born the following January. An unplanned pregnancy was something of an embarrassment to a woman who prided herself on being in full control of her life, but Marianne was still at an age when she didn’t doubt her past decisions or that her life was on the right course. Izzy might have been an accident, but it was an accident for which she felt doubly blessed.

  Putting her mug into the sink, Marianne went into the bedroom where Izzy was still asleep in her cot at the foot of their bed. Marianne would have much preferred her daughter to have slept in a separate room but that was an impossibility in Moscow. As it was, they were lucky with their apartment: two good-sized rooms with a kitchen, bathroom and efficient central heating. However, at four and a half, Izzy was no longer a baby and their sex life had not been improved by this arrangement. They tended now – if they were both in the mood, which seemed less and less often – to make love on the living room sofa or on the floor, before going into the bedroom. Recently Edward had developed a taste for her kneeling on the rug, which wasn’t her favourite position, but at least it seemed to get him fired up and he hadn’t been in the best frame of mind since their arrival in Moscow.

  Marianne sat at the end of the bed and watched her daughter. Her breathing now was quiet and steady; her darkening yellow curls spread across the pillow, her hair colour slowly changing towards Marianne’s own blonde-brown. From the side, her profile showed her little upturned nose and the distinctive curve of her eyebrows.

  For some time now Edward had been talking about enlarging their family and expressing concern about the age gap which would exist between Izzy and any future child, but Marianne did not feel ready. She knew that the tiredness and nausea which had marked the early stages of her pregnancy would play havoc with her work and she was determined to complete her doctorate before starting another pregnancy. The age gap would already be too great to provide a companion for Izzy.

  Marianne held her daughter’s hand as they walked past the policeman in the guard box at the front of their apartment block and made their way towards the metro station. Autumn is the best season in Moscow, Marianne had been assured, and she acknowledged that sentiment now as she breathed in the freshness of the air after the stifling heat of the summer. The sun felt warm on her face despite the coolness of the air; watermelons were still on sale in the fruit stands but accompanied now by crates of Hungarian apples.

  ‘Can we go past the magic castle?’ asked Izzy, skipping along beside her mother.

  ‘I’m not sure that we will have time, darling,’ said Marianne, smiling to herself as she remembered Izzy’s name for St Basil’s Cathedral. ‘We are going to buy you some new clothes today because you are growing out of everything and you start at kindergarten next week.’

  ‘Don’t want to go.’

  ‘I’m sure you will enjoy it. There will be lots of other children to play with. And think about it. If you don’t go to kindergarten, I won’t be able to do my own work. Do you remember I told you the Russian words for kindergarten?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yes, you do, think.’

  ‘Oh… sad, you said it’s sad.’

  ‘Not just sad,’ laughed Marianne, ‘detsky sad, and today we’re going to a shop called Detsky Mir, which means “Children’s World”.’ It was an article of faith for Marianne that Isabelle would pick up fluent Russian while they were in Moscow. Then, with Marianne’s help, she would be able to keep it all her life. Later Marianne would introduce her to French and send her to stay with her cousins in France.

  Emerging from the metro at Dzerzhinsky Square, Marianne and Izzy were met by the large and imposing statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, known as Iron Felix, founder of the Soviet secret police. And behind the statue loomed the massive Lubyanka building, headquarters of the KGB. There was a certain irony, Marianne thought, that the Children’s World should be almost next door to the sinister Lubyanka. Moving towards the front of Detsky Mir, Marianne’s heart sank at the sight of the crowds thronging the entrance. Everyone had said that this was the place where you had to go for children’s clothes or toys but it seemed that the whole of Moscow was there as well.

  ‘So, a hard day’s shopping,’ said Edward, when she was back in the flat that evening.

  ‘Whatever you were doing today, I guarantee it was better than going to that place.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be so sure,’ said Edward. ‘My day was quite distressing.’

  There was something about Edward’s tone which suggested to Marianne that he had more to say. She stopped stirring the goulash and turned to look at him. ‘How come?’

  ‘I had to assist at an appendectomy for a twelve-year-old boy. Simple, you might think – except when it’s done under local anaesthetic which doesn’t last long enough and the boy is writhing in agony.’

  ‘Appendix out under a local?’

  ‘Yes. The thing is, no one thought this to be particularly strange.’

  ‘How horrible.’

  ‘Yes, it’s obscene. A country which builds nuclear missiles and sends people into space…’

  ‘Are they short of the right drugs?’

  ‘Probably – also short of trained anaesthetists.’

  ‘My poor honey,’ said Marianne walking over to her husband and giving him a long hug. ‘Despite being a doctor, you’ve never been good with pain.’

  ‘That’s true. Neither my own nor others. But I think doctors should be sensitive to pain. Managing pain is as important as curing the sick.’

  Marianne felt unusually animated as she and Edward prepared to leave the flat to attend their dinner invitation with Larry. Perhaps, she thought, it’s because we don’t often get to go out now or perhaps it’s the prospect of dinner at the Aragvi. Edward was less
cheerful. He was upset because one of the nurses was leaving the hospital. ‘You know, we are the ones who screw up their system,’ he said. ‘Yevgenia only made seventy roubles a month. Now she has doubled that working as a nanny for some foreign family like us.’

  Indeed, thought Marianne, as she watched their babysitter Lyudmila smiling and laughing as she and Izzy played some incomprehensible game together. Marianne didn’t mind that Lyudmila spoke very little English, jabbering away to Izzy in Russian, and it seemed that Izzy didn’t mind too much either. ‘Don’t worry,’ she had been assured soon after arriving in Moscow, ‘all Russians love children,’ and that had certainly been her experience to date.

  It took Marianne and Edward longer to get to the restaurant than they had expected and all the other guests had arrived before them. Marianne had tried to cheer Edward up, explaining that the Aragvi was a famous Georgian restaurant – perhaps the best known in the whole of Moscow – which had been popular for decades with the Soviet elite and especially with Stalin’s favourite henchman Beria.

  As introductions were being made at the table Marianne tried to concentrate. She noted she was being seated to the right of Larry. On the other side was Hank, a large, baby-faced Texan with cropped blond hair. Opposite was Hank’s wife, Cynthia, a sharp, angular woman who gave Marianne a ‘don’t mess with my husband’ look. Next to Cynthia, she was surprised to find a good-looking Russian man, a theatre director, Andrei – was that his name? – contradicting what she had been told, that Soviet citizens weren’t supposed to mix with embassy people. Further down was his attractive wife Galina and at Edward’s end of the table another American couple, Barbara and some man whose name she didn’t quite catch.