Good People

by Nir Baram

  Indeed, the absence of Osip Borisovich Levayev made the people sitting in the living room uncomfortable. He was an enthusiastic admirer of Nadyezhda Petrovna, and in the past he had even obtained handwritten permission from Sergei Kirov, when he was the most powerful and admired man in Leningrad, to print a book of her poems. And then there was the scandal when he headbutted the author Alexei Tolstoy, after the latter labelled Nadyezhda Petrovna’s first book ‘decadent cosmopolitanism’.

  ‘His wife would rather he was dead,’ announced Emma Feodorovna. She took off her broad-brimmed hat, fluffed her hair up and lit a cigarette, blowing the smoke straight at Brodsky’s spectacles. Her greenish eyes glowed with the argumentative light that tormented the offended faces of her friends, but Alexandra, whom everybody called Sasha, always saw in that light the lovely lament of a dissatisfied soul. ‘So long as he isn’t arrested,’ Emma went on, ‘because then she’d have to run around for him instead of lying in bed all day with that stammering sister of hers, slandering the whole world.’

  Sasha was standing against the wall in her darkened room. A mocking twitch fluttered over her lips. When she was little, Emma used to pick her up, cover her face with kisses smelling of cigarettes, and tell bad stories about everyone, even about Sasha’s own parents. Now Sasha nudged the door so she could see the whole living room, including the eastern side where her parents were. This was the second time in a month that this weary bunch had met to make a plan about Nadyezhda Petrovna’s arrest, but in fact to ward off the danger to themselves. Once again they would probably adopt ‘urgent action points’ that no one would dare implement.

  She couldn’t restrain herself and poked her head out to peek at her father, Andrei, in the mirror between the bookshelves. He was in his rocking chair, gazing at the fine glass frame that hung on the wall opposite him: a map of ‘The Great Factories of the Soviet Union’, a gift from the head of the Physical-Technical Institute to the physicist, Comrade Andrei Weissberg. From time to time he looked at her mother, Valeria, who was leaning over the kerosene stove and pouring tea for the guests while asking after their health and that of their families. Sasha despised this ceremony: every time her father looked at his wife, his gaze would cloud with helplessness. In her presence he behaved like a man stunned by the vagaries of the world, who needed Valeria to speak for him.

  For example, last summer the head informed Andrei that he would have the honour of representing the institute in Moscow at a meeting of the People’s Commissariat for Heavy Industry, where the plans for 1939 would be discussed. It was widely known that anyone who went to Moscow would be arrested as soon as they came back, because they had met too many people, and had been asked too many questions, whose answers aroused someone’s suspicion. And, in general, a visit to Moscow attracted unnecessary attention to a person’s existence, which was why the head preferred to send a worker whom he hoped would say the right thing when asked about him.

  Her father didn’t dare reject the unwelcome honour, but as soon as he got home from work he went to bed and refused to get up. The next morning Valeria visited the head and explained that her Andreyusha was prone to nightmares in unfamiliar environments, and would spout nonsense in his sleep that a stranger might misinterpret. The next day the head announced that Weissberg wouldn’t be going to Moscow.

  Now her mother sat down on the chair next to Andrei and placed his hand on her slim hips. She sat straight, taller than her husband; her chin seemed to hover over her long neck, and her presence bespoke chilly pride. It was clear that she wanted everyone to know that she had no truck with petty personal calculations, and would rise above her husband’s weakness.

  Sasha scorned her. Only someone abandoned to her own illusions could think that any of the guests might be taken in by this performance. True, unlike Sasha, none of them had seen Valeria sitting on her bed night after night, pretending to be lost in a book, waiting for her husband to come home—but even if someone decided to believe in the impression she was trying so hard to make, the inevitable moment would come when the spell wore off, and only the hard evidence remained. All the strategies of a betrayed woman cannot negate the fact that she is betrayed.

  A soft knock on the door.

  Brodsky hid his face in his plate, Emma Feodorovna stubbed her cigarette out in the ashtray and stirred the butts in it, Varlamov’s head sank back into the sofa. How easily they scared, Sasha raged. A gentle knock like that didn’t sound dangerous.

  Her mother hurried to the door. ‘Osip Borisovich,’ her voice rang out from the hall. ‘How good to see you.’

  ‘My wife is sick,’ Levayev’s proud voice bellowed. ‘I just popped over for a moment.’

  Meanwhile, in the living room, the guests started up again. ‘Strange, Nadya’s arrest, very strange. If she was involved in something improper…’ Varlamov repeated exactly what he had said at the earlier meeting. Had age impaired his memory, Sasha wondered, or does he not want to say anything else?

  ‘If they arrested Nadka, they must have had a good reason,’ mumbled Brodsky. Crumbled egg yolk clung to his red beard. He sliced his second egg into thin strips and arranged them on his plate. Nadya once told Sasha that it was enough to see how Brodsky handled an egg to know he had never slept with a woman.

  Her mother took the arm of the strapping young man, who was as usual impeccably dressed, and sat him down at her side. Emma Feodorovna lit another cigarette, aimed the smoke at his handsome face and made fun of his new hairdo: short at the back with a wild black curl at the front. ‘Osip Borisovich, is that a gesture to your boyhood in the Ukraine, that thing on your head?’

  Konstantin Varlamov hid his face in his cup of tea and slurped. He was primed to explain, as usual, why any appeal to his highly placed friends on behalf of Nadyezhda Petrovna would be futile. If they arrested people like Radek and Pyatakov, Rykov and Yezhov, Garniko and Petrovsky, not to mention Bukharin and Zinoviev, how could his friends do anything for an unknown woman poet? Varlamov recited this litany each time he thought he might be asked to help someone who had been arrested. Everyone was impressed: ‘The old man’s a genius! After the last litany—it went for twenty-seven minutes, including memory lapses—no one will dare to ask for his help ever again.’

  Emma rested her elbow on the cover of the black piano. Out of all the men and women who were poets in Leningrad, Emma Feodorovna had chosen Nadyezhda Petrovna to be her satanic double—her close friend and even closer enemy. Nadya always beat Emma to it, making conquests that Emma had merely dreamed about, leaving her only scraps of glory. One of Sasha’s clearest childhood memories was a poetry evening at the end of which Emma had emptied a bottle of kerosene on Nadya’s red rubber cape after she had declared that Emma’s poems put her to sleep standing up, just like the stories of Maximich. The insult of the comparison with Gorky pushed Emma over the edge as, visibly trembling, she stood in front of Nadya, who was leaning on the windowsill.

  ‘Go ahead,’ Nadya said, ‘light a match if you dare, but only if you dare, my dear.’

  Osip Levayev looked at their faces as though wondering at their faintness of heart. He turned to Sasha’s father and said, ‘Andrei Pavlovich, it’s true I missed the previous meeting, but this evening you’ve invited us to your home again. Perhaps you can explain to us what, in your opinion, we should do? It goes without saying that all of us are asking questions about the arrest. I don’t know a thing about it. In the past few months I’ve hardly seen Nadya at all.’

  From her hiding place Sasha surveyed the young man, whose cold expression emphasised the distance that had come between him and Nadya and her close friends. If so, why had he turned up here this evening anyway? Was he the informer? Or maybe he had been going out of his mind with fear at home and wanted to find a way to avoid arrest? This gathering endangered them all, but Nadya’s arrest had taken her friends to the brink. Maybe a demonstration of innocence at a meeting that would doubtless be revealed to the NKVD was preferable to staying at home. Osip Borisovich’s l
ips were now dancing in front of Sasha like a pink half-moon. Four years earlier, on her eighteenth birthday, they had kissed at the beach. He had begged her for a whole year not to tell her mother, and took pains to praise all her poems. They weren’t especially good, she knew that, and anyway her dream of becoming a poet had recently lost its charm. She might have been enchanted by Nadya’s and Emma’s poems when she was growing up—but was poetry really how she wanted to spend her life?

  Andrei Pavlovich Weissberg, the man now called upon to lead the group, rocked in his chair and gazed out at the sky, over which the early autumn darkness had spread. Cold gusts struck the windowpanes, and they all wrapped themselves in their coats. Her father, too, removed his coat from the back of the chair and put it on like a scolded child. His tormented face told of the horrors he had conjured up in his imagination: his beloved Nadka in jail, dragged out of a narrow cell, where she had been forced to stand up, on her own, for many days, unable to tell day from night, into the interrogation room, where they sat her down—though sometimes they punished her by making her stand there too—for eight-hour sessions, and then another hour, demanding again and again that she tell the story of her life, name names, confess.

  Sasha understood that her father was already mourning for Nadya. In recent years he had grown weaker, as if he no longer believed in anyone’s ability to decide his own fate. If it was up to him, he would have already held a memorial ceremony for her.

  He had only dragged her to Nadya’s house once. She must have been around twelve. The poet was ill. She had been in bed for weeks, and her father went to her tiny, unheated room every day. Sasha felt as if someone was shoving her nose into a bottle of oil. Tangled in her bedding, Nadya whined that her body was betraying her, that two old women and four children were living with her in the apartment and torturing her, that Emma Feodorovna was smearing her with oil as if she were the axle of a wagon.

  Her father pulled the blanket off and wiped away her perspiration. Sasha turned around and stared at the wall. Nadya kept complaining: no one came to visit, a person was ill for a few days and everyone had her in the grave already, her back ached from the treachery of her friends. ‘Look at me, girl!’ she shouted at Sasha. ‘You’re the only one who won’t betray me!’

  Sasha turned around and watched her father kiss her eyes and forehead, purring endearments. He fed her beef soup from the cafeteria at the institute. Sasha could see how he came to life around this woman. When Nadya became drowsy, her father kissed her hand, pressed it to his heart and consoled her with stories about all the influential people whom her poetry had moved. Soon she would receive a special grant, Brodsky was terribly impressed and was going to write a review.

  Now Sasha stretched her legs, which had fallen asleep, and paced her room. She stopped at her desk, and in the dim light from the living room sorted the slips of paper on which she’d written her tasks for the coming week. Everything seemed boring, especially the interview her friend Zhenya had arranged for a job taking shorthand. Her mother railed at her for never getting through more than a quarter of her tasks. But her mother didn’t understand anything. Naturally if she had an interesting job like Brodsky, who wrote about books in the newspaper, or even like Zhenya, who translated articles into English for the foreign news section of Leningradskaya Pravda, she would work day and night.

  She went back to the door. Silence reigned in the living room. Her father sat bent over, wearily drumming on his knees. There would be no salvation from Andrei Weissberg. Now everyone turned to Vladimir Morozovsky, who had not said a word. Morozovsky worked in a car repair shop, mainly for high-ranking officials. He loved poetry, and loved talking about poetry with poets even more, no matter if he bored them. ‘No, no one said anything. I asked a friend who is a member of certain institutions, and whose circle includes men whose influence is not to be sneezed at—’

  ‘And what did he say?’ Emma broke in.

  ‘He said that there are no rumours, and that’s usually the worst sign.’ Morozovsky shrugged and spread his huge hands. People joked that in a single fist he could hold Weissberg’s and Brodsky’s heads and all the women who had slept with them.

  ‘There was a reason to arrest Nadya,’ Levayev said, adopting a serious expression. ‘More and more sabotage networks are being discovered. Loyal citizens must remain vigilant and help the authorities uncover the truth.’

  ‘You, Andreyusha,’ Emma said to Sasha’s father with a mischievous look, ‘were the closest of all to Nadka, even at night. You must have some idea why she was arrested.’

  No one dared look at Valeria as she sat by her husband, massaging his hand—except for Emma, of course.

  ‘Emma Feodorovna, Andreyusha already said that he doesn’t know anything. He’s busy all day at the institute,’ Valeria scolded her. ‘I suggest that we turn to Comrade Stepan Kristoforovich Merkalov, the new head of the department…’

  ‘No, we need someone in the literary world,’ Emma objected. ‘Brodsky can write to his beloved teacher, Tolstoy!’ She made sure everyone had caught her mocking tone. ‘He must appreciate our friend’s critical perspective.’

  Emma really had a noble soul, Sasha decided, since her life would be easier in a world without Nadya—but she was prepared to take a risk to try to save her.

  Brodsky scratched his reddish beard and appraised his friends with his bright, grave eyes. Now Sasha saw her mother glare at Brodsky. Her imagination shaved his beard off and examined his naked face: was he the informer? Maybe all these fears were exaggerated, unnerving them, kindling constant suspicion? Maybe there were no informers here at all?

  ‘It would do no good to speak to Tolstoy,’ Brodsky’s silky voice crooned. ‘He read Nadya’s long poem where she says what she thinks about his writing: “Footprints in the snow are better literature.” Not long ago we asked him to give her coupons for a sweater and a coat. He authorised the sweater, but refused the coat.’

  ‘Why did she have to ask? Isn’t she getting a pension?’ inquired Morozovsky.

  ‘They replaced it years ago with old-age benefits,’ Brodsky chuckled. ‘Barely a hundred rubles. Her father told me they wrote to her: “You are receiving an allowance by virtue of your devoted work on behalf of Russian literature, and because it is not possible to use your services at the present time.” And someone from the Writers’ Association told her, “It would be better if you stopped writing poetry.”’

  An image glimmered on the edge of Sasha’s consciousness: they were sitting in Varlamov’s garden, and the old poet was giving one of his speeches. Nadya hugged her. ‘Girl, if you want to be a poet,’ she said, ‘just remember one thing—true poets resist the enchanting spells of nostalgia.’

  She struggled to drive away the memory. Her mother was placing a platter of poppy-seed cookies on the round wicker table. Beneath it she could see the twins’ tattered slippers. ‘I remembered something,’ said Osip Borisovich. ‘It would be wrong not to mention it: wasn’t there some kind of connection between Nadka and Bliumkin in the twenties? Could that be behind the accusations against her?’

  Stillness fell in the living room, interrupted by the clink of Brodsky’s fork.

  Her father shut his eyes as he always did when he knew he was hearing something because of cruel fate.

  ‘Bliumkin! A despicable human being!’ Varlamov shouted at the wall. ‘A murderer who betrayed the proletariat, and had the effrontery to start scheming with the Trotskyites. His execution was a happy day for the party!’

  Sasha stifled a laugh. This habit of talking to the wall was new. No one doubted that the telephones were tapped, and now people had started asking: were they installing microphones in the walls too? If so, in which ones? Many believed that it couldn’t be done, or they were listening to more important targets. Nevertheless, niggling doubts remained: perhaps some things were best said directly to the wall.

  ‘Bliumkin was a filthy dog, an enemy of the people. Death was too good for him,’ Brodsky proclaimed to the f
aded wallpaper.

  ‘They say that the traitor Bliumkin used to give women pleasure until they went mad,’ commented Emma Fiodrovna, ‘almost like our friend Brodsky.’

  Why did Osip bring up Bliumkin? He wouldn’t have dared, Sasha concluded, unless he received an order from someone. The NKVD? No, that was too simple and suspicious a move.

  ‘Osip Borisovich, we admire your sincerity, but there’s no point throwing rumours around with no evidence to support them,’ said Valeria. She brought her hand up to her face and divided it horizontally at eye level, then plucked at the air with her fingers until her hand moved towards the sky, as though giving a sign that her words had evaporated. Sasha was charmed by the perfection of this gesture every time her mother made it. The guests, still traumatised by the very mention of Bliumkin’s name, did not take in the way she softened her reprimand. ‘You’re still young, and you don’t know that this isn’t our way of behaving.’

  Sasha watched: her father now picked up on the caressing tone. He glanced at his wife in surprise. She was looking straight ahead. Her body relaxed, and her chin sank.

  Sasha turned away, finding it hard to breathe. It was unbearable to watch this miserable woman not daring to defend her dignity. All of her friends knew about her husband’s infidelity. Now she could see the whole evening from her mother’s point of view. Valeria had been enlisted in the effort to help her husband’s lover, and the sight was so saddening that Sasha knew she had to kill her compassion dead, so it could never emerge again, making her incapable of venting her anger against her father.

  ‘Of course. I hope the whole thing is a misunderstanding,’ Levayev sputtered. Valeria poured him a healthy shot of vodka, and he sipped it with a faint gurgle of pleasure. ‘But it’s impossible to set things right if we don’t know the source of the inaccuracy.’