The Secrets We Kept

by Lara Prescott

  I asked if he’d accompany me to Fedin’s dacha—step one of my plan. He agreed, reluctantly. We left the tavern and trudged up the muddy hill.

  I knocked at the door of the grand home of the newly anointed chair of the Writers’ Union, built from large logs stacked atop each other. No one came, so I knocked again. Fedin’s young daughter answered. Without invitation, I barged in. Mitya waited outside. Just as Katya was saying her father wasn’t home, he appeared.

  “Make us some tea, Katya?” Fedin asked his daughter.

  “I don’t want tea,” I said.

  Fedin’s shoulders rose, then fell. “Come.” I followed him into his office, where he sat, swiveling in a leather chair. Looking like a snowy owl on his perch—with his white hair, his high widow’s peak, his arched eyebrows—he gestured for me to sit across from him.

  “I’ll stand,” I said. I was so tired of sitting across from men. I got right to the point. “He will kill himself tonight if something isn’t done.”

  “You mustn’t say such a thing.”

  “He has the pills. I’ve delayed him, but I don’t know what more I can do.”

  “You must restrain him.”

  “How? It is you and the rest of the Central Committee who have done this.”

  Fedin rubbed his eyes and straightened his back. “I warned him this would happen.”

  “You warned him?” I shouted. “When did you warn him?”

  “The day he won. I went to his dacha and told him myself that his acceptance would force the State’s hand. I told him, as a friend, that he must turn it down or face the consequences. Surely he told you of this.”

  He hadn’t. Another thing he’d kept from me.

  “Boris has created the abyss he stands at now,” Fedin continued. “And if he kills himself, it will be a terrible thing for the country, an even deeper wound than the ones he’s already inflicted.”

  “Nothing can be done?”

  He told me he’d arrange for Boris and me to meet with Polikarpov—the same official from the Culture Department with whom I’d pleaded after Borya had sent his manuscript away with the Italians. We could make our case in person to him, with the understanding that Borya would apologize for his actions.

  I agreed, and I was prepared to do everything in my power to convince Borya to agree to it. I’d tell him he was selfish. I’d bring up my time in Potma. I’d tell him they’d go after me again. I’d tell him he had never given me what I’d wanted most: to be his wife, to have his child.

  But in the end, there was no need.

  Before I could ask, Borya informed me he’d already settled the matter. He’d sent two telegrams: one to Stockholm, declining the Prize, and one to the Kremlin, letting them know. The Nobel would not be his.

  “They’re coming for me, Olga. I can feel it. Even when I’m writing in my study, I can feel them watching. It won’t be long now. One day, you’ll wait for me and I’ll never come.”

  WEST

  December 1958

  CHAPTER 25

  The Swallow

  The Informant

  THE DEFECTOR

  According to my former employer, one can sum up the entire spectrum of human motivations with a formula called MICE: Money, Ideology, Compromise, Ego. I wondered how the other side would assess me. Did they have their own formula? Did they think through these things with more nuance?

  The woman who’d told me about Henry hadn’t yet appeared again, but I knew she would in time. Meanwhile, I sold off two of my favorite Hermès scarves and my remaining copies of Zhivago. I did keep one, though, the English edition I failed to return at Le Mistral—which I placed in the nightstand next to my bed, where one might find a Bible in an American hotel.

  I no longer spent my days in my room; I no longer mourned the person I used to be. Mornings, I went to the Jardin des Tuileries—walking the gravel corridors of perfectly manicured trees, feeding the ducks and swans at the pond, pulling a green chair into a spot of sun to read. In the afternoons, as the days got shorter, I sat at every terrace on rue de la Huchette, sampling each café’s selection of mulled wine. I made friends with the barman at Le Caveau just so I could sit on one of the plush red couches and listen to Sacha Distel croon night after night.

  Wherever I was, she was never far from my mind. I kept waiting for the day when I’d wake up and my first thought wouldn’t be of her. The worst was when I dreamed of her. How one moment we were together, only to wake and feel the loss all over again. Sometimes I’d feel a spark run across my body, convinced Irina must’ve been thinking of me at that exact moment. Silly.

  On her birthday, I wanted to call—even just to hear her answer—but didn’t. Instead, I opened the nightstand drawer, removed the book, and, for the first time, began to read.

  On they went, singing “Rest Eternal,” and whenever they stopped, their feet, the horses, and the gusts of wind seemed to carry on their singing.

  His words grabbed hold of my wrist. I knew the way a feeling can linger after a song ends. I shut the book and went out onto my balcony, which was only big enough for a single chair. I sat and opened the book again.

  When I read the part where Yuri reunites with Lara, in the battlefield hospital, and realized that this book—this novel they deemed a weapon—was really a love story, I wanted to close it once more. But I didn’t. I read until the sun had faded into a purple halo over the tops of the buildings. I read until the streetlights turned on and I had to squint to make out the sentences. When it became too dark, I went back inside. Wrapping myself in my robe, I lay down and continued to read—until I fell asleep, my hand an accidental bookmark.

  When I awoke, it was nearly midnight and I was hungry. I dressed and put the book into my purse.

  As I crossed the hotel lobby, I saw the woman from the bookshop seated on a chaise longue, beneath a portrait of Flaubert. Impeccably dressed in Chanel tweed, her hair was still perfectly finger-waved, albeit two shades lighter than it was when she told me about Henry. When she saw me, she got up without making eye contact and left.

  We walked for what must have been twenty minutes, the woman never looking back. Eventually, we came to a stop at the Café de Flore, on the boulevard Saint-Germain. The café’s awning dripped with white Christmas lights. Its terrace was empty, and its snow-laden wicker chairs looked as if they were wearing white fur coats. A torn red, white, and blue Vive de Gaulle banner hung from the wrought iron balcony on the second floor.

  Inside, the woman kissed both my cheeks again and left, but not before pointing to a table in the back, where a man I recognized was waiting.

  I knew they’d come, but I wasn’t expecting it to be him.

  He stood to greet me, the too-small tortoiseshell glasses he’d worn to Feltrinelli’s party gone. “Ciao, bella,” he said, his Italian accent also gone, replaced with a Russian one. He reached for my hand and kissed it. “Pleasure seeing you again. I suppose you’ve come to have your dresses cleaned?”

  “Possibly.”

  We sat and he handed me a menu. “Order whatever you’d like.” He raised a finger. “One cannot subsist on pain au chocolat alone.” He already had an open bottle of white wine and a silver tray of untouched snails in front of him, so I ordered a croque monsieur from the crisp-collared waiter and waited for him to speak.

  He drank the last of the wine and signaled the waiter for another bottle. “I prefer women to men and wine to both,” he joked. Communist or capitalist, men are still men. “We wanted to thank you in person,” he continued. “For your generosity.”

  “Did you find it useful?”

  “Oh, yes. A talker, that one. Very…how do you say…”

  “Social?”

  “Yes! Exactly. Social.”

  I didn’t ask for details about what happened to Henry Rennet, and I didn’t want to know. For a year, I’d wanted re
venge more than I’d ever wanted anything. And after he’d gotten me fired, I not only wanted to destroy him, I wanted to burn the whole thing to the ground. But I felt only a minor relief at the confirmation of Henry’s fate. Anger is a poor replacement for sadness; like cotton candy, the sweetness of revenge disintegrates immediately. And now that it was gone, what did I have left to keep me going?

  The waiter returned with my food, and as my new friend ate his snails, he laid it all out for me in as few words as possible.

  “How long will you be in Paris?” he asked.

  “I have no return ticket.”

  He dipped a snail into a dish of melted butter. “Good! You should do some traveling. See the world. There’s so much a woman like you can do. The world is yours for the taking.”

  “Hard to take it with limited funds, though.”

  “Ah.” He slurped down a snail and pointed his two-pronged fork at me. “But I can tell you are a resourceful woman. And one who deserves whatever she asks for.”

  “I’m not sure that’s the case anymore.”

  “I assure you it is. You undervalue yourself. Maybe less perceptive men can’t see it, but I can. As Emerson said, one must be an opener of doors.”

  Since arriving in Paris, I’d walked past the big black doors within the high cement wall enclosing the Hôtel d’Estrées several times. Each time, I’d look up and see the red flag with its gold hammer and sickle and wonder: What would it be like to walk in as one person and out as another? Here was my invitation to find out.

  I thought of Henry Rennet dancing me through the restaurant lobby, then opening the coatroom door behind me. I thought of Anderson passing by, after, without a word—then seated at his big mahogany desk telling me I was no longer a desirable asset and how he hated to say it but I’d become too much of a risk to keep on. I thought of Frank passing me in the hallway as I left HQ for the last time without so much as a handshake.

  I thought of Irina—the first time I saw her, and the last. I’d planned to talk to her after her mother’s funeral, to comfort her, to hold her, to tell her everything. But instead of going to the cemetery, I went to Georgetown and sat through the second half of The Quiet American, alone.

  I still had the note I’d planned to slip her after the funeral in my pocket. The words I wrote had worn completely away from constantly being rubbed between my fingers as I walked the streets of Paris. But I remembered what I’d written, the words I never gave her, the truth I’d kept to myself.

  And then there was the truth I kept from myself. I’d boarded the plane to Paris convinced there was no alternative. But that first night, the what ifs surrounded me like a cloud of gnats. I imagined the whitewashed house in New England that Irina and I could’ve moved to—its yellow door and porch swing and bay window overlooking the Atlantic. I imagined us going into town each morning for coffee and doughnuts, the townsfolk thinking we were roommates. As I thought of all the paths I didn’t take, the loss came over me like a lead blanket.

  I thought of the book in the purse sitting next to me. How did it end? Do Yuri and Lara end up together? Or do they die alone and miserable?

  The waiter took our plates and asked if he could get us anything else.

  “A bottle of champagne, perhaps?” my new friend asked, looking at me, not the waiter.

  I raised my glass. “When in Paris.”

  EAST

  January 1959

  CHAPTER 26

  The Muse

  The Rehabilitated Woman

  The Emissary

  The Mother

  The Emissary

  THE POSTMISTRESS

  The first copies were passed from hand to hand in the parlors of Moscow’s intelligentsia. After Borya won the Nobel, then declined it, copies of the copies were made. Then copies of those copies. Doctor Zhivago was whispered about in the bowels of the Leningrad Metro, passed from worker to worker in the labor camps, and sold on the black market. “Have you read it?” people across the Motherland asked each other in hushed voices. “Why was it kept from us?” The it never needed to be named. Soon the black market was flooded, and everyone could read the novel they’d been denied.

  When Ira brought a copy home, I forbade her to keep it in the house. “Don’t you realize?” I cried, ripping the pages up and tossing them into the bin. “It’s a loaded pistol.”

  “You’re the one who bought the bullets. You placed him above our family.”

  “He is our family.”

  “And I know what you’re keeping hidden here. Don’t think I don’t!” She stormed out before I could respond.

  The money was kept in a russet leather suitcase with a brass lock tucked behind the long dresses in the back of my closet. The bundles were wrapped in plastic, stacked neatly in rows under two pairs of trousers.

  D’Angelo had arranged for the transfer—first from Feltrinelli to an account in Liechtenstein, then to an Italian couple living in Moscow. The Italian couple would phone my apartment and say a delivery for Pasternak was waiting at the post office. I would then collect the suitcase, take the train to Peredelkino, and store it at Little House for safekeeping.

  Borya didn’t want it. Not at first. With the State having cut off his ability to publish or make a living through his translations, he said we’d find other ways to support ourselves. I reasoned with him that it was but a fraction of what he was owed. Feltrinelli had sold so many copies, he’d already had to reprint it twelve times in Italian; it was a bestseller in America too. The film rights had even been sold to Hollywood. In the West, Borya would’ve been a very wealthy man. When he said we’d make do with what we have and we should be grateful we have each other, I asked him to imagine what would become of me and my family once he was gone.

  He eventually came around.

  To say I pushed him to accept the foreign royalties would be an understatement; to say I had anything in mind other than ensuring my family would be taken care of, a lie. But why not get something for myself? Why not? After everything I’d done. After everything I’d been through.

  But with the money came even more surveillance. They were still watching. I saw no one but always felt their eyes. I shut the windows, closed the drapes, and obsessively checked the locks to Little House. At night, every branch breaking, every gust of wind rattling the door, every screech from some distant car made me jump. Sleep was out of the question.

  Seeking relief, I left Little House to stay at my Moscow apartment. It was difficult to be away from Borya, but for the first time in my life, I was glad for the five flights of stairs, the onionskin-thin walls, and my many neighbors who lived on top of one another. If something were to happen, surely someone would hear it and come to my aid. Wouldn’t they?

  I was also glad to be with my family. I was seized with the feeling that I needed to be near my children, something I hadn’t felt so strongly since they were young. But Mitya and Ira stayed out of the apartment, making excuses about friends and school. When they were home, they treated my mother with the respect they denied me. Mitya, who had always been such an obedient child, began acting out. Not coming home when he said he would, sometimes smelling of liquor. Ira chose to spend most of her time with a new boyfriend.

  Borya was warned by friends to leave Peredelkino for the safety of the city, but he refused. “If they come to stone me, let them. I’d rather die in the country.”

  The first night I spent back in Moscow, a neighbor knocked on our door and told us that Vladimir Yefimovich Semichastny was giving a speech on television about Boris. Ira and I followed her back to her apartment and stood with her family around the tiny television propped up on a cold radiator. The black-and-white picture flickered in and out, but we could hear the leader of the Young Communist League loud and clear. “This man went and spat in the face of the people,” Semichastny railed. “If you compare Pasternak to a pig, a pig would no
t do what he did, because a pig never shits where it eats.” The camera panned to the crowd of thousands. “I am sure the society and government will not place any obstacles in his way, but would, on the contrary, agree that his departure from our midst would make our air fresher.” The audience erupted in applause. Khrushchev himself, sitting on the dais, stood and clapped. Ira looked at me with fear in her eyes. I took her hand and led her back to our apartment.

  Later that night, Mitya woke me. A drunken party had gathered in front of our building. I wrapped a shawl around my shoulders, went to the balcony, and looked down. Three men wearing dresses, no doubt sent by the KGB, were dancing and singing “Black Raven,” an old drinking folk song I’d always hated.

  Raven black, why are you wheeling,

  Over my head circling low?

  Ever will your prey elude you.

  Raven black, I am not yours!

  The noise had also awoken my neighbors, who joined me outside on their balconies and yelled for them to shut up. The men dressed as women looked up and laughed. One pointed in my direction. Then they linked arms and sang even louder.

  Why do you spread wide your talons,

  Over my head circling low?

  Or do you sense prey beneath you?

  Raven black, I am not yours!

  “You can’t tell from up here,” Mitya whispered, “but they’re wearing wigs. Bad ones. One has lipstick smeared across his mouth like a clown.”

  Take my shawl, now stained with red blood,

  To my darling, dearly loved.

  Say to her that she is free now: