Mourning Ruby

by Helen Dunmore

  Adam lifted his glass of vodka and looked through it. It had the faintest yellow sheen in it, though it was perfectly clear. Ruby was curled on his knee, drowsy, sucking the piece of muslin nappy which she took to bed. Her eyes were still open but they were glazing. Her faith in us clenched my heart. As long as we were with her, she did not mind where she was.

  ‘Let’s drink a toast to Ruby,’ said Joe, but Ruby was past stirring, even at the sound of her own name. All through the flight she had perched on my lap, or Adam’s, watching everything.

  ‘To Ruby,’ said Adam. He smiled down at her, his face naked and tender. A drop of vodka fell on her hair.

  ‘To Ruby.’

  ‘To Ruby.’

  Olya said something in Russian and Joe told us it meant health and long life. Olya’s words seemed to have weight to them, as if her wishes were true gifts. Maybe it was only because they were said in a foreign language.

  ‘And good dreams,’ said Olya.

  ‘So, how’s the new book going, Joe?’ Adam asked.

  ‘I’ll tell you about it,’ said Joe, filling our glasses again.

  12

  Thanks to Stalin

  Life has become better, Comrades, life has become more cheerful!

  ‘So here we are in this flat thanks to Stalin,’ said Joe. The words stung in my head.

  ‘Don’t you remember?’ asked Joe.

  ‘No.’

  ‘It was something you said to me once.’

  But I still couldn’t remember. Olya rose, and went to make tea.

  ‘I’m tracking the bastard down,’ said Joe. ‘But he’s slippery.’

  ‘What are you writing about?’

  ‘If you can call it writing. I sit for three hours and when I get up there are two words on the screen. Ask Olya.’

  ‘What are you not writing about, then?’

  ‘The same old thing. Stalin’s fugue. What a man does when he’s in charge of everything and the world still goes wrong. What was he doing? What did he think he was doing?’

  ‘You tell me,’ said Adam suddenly, surprising us both.

  ‘All right,’ said Joe.

  *

  He explained the problems. Closed archives, archives that open for a while then close again, archives that can be accessed briefly, with an official standing at your side, newspaper files with months of issues missing, people who were too afraid to write anything down, people who are dead, people who falsified their sources when they wrote their histories, and made sure the water they left behind them was full of mud. Fear, the best censor of all.

  ‘Not still fear, after all this time,’ said Adam. ‘Surely. Everything’s different now.’

  ‘It can’t be different,’ said Joe. ‘The present here is what the past has made it, just like anywhere else. Only here, it’s more difficult to uncover the roots of the past and find out where the behaviour of the present comes from. People hide things and they don’t want to talk about them. It’s ours, they say. Even if they do talk, they don’t trust outsiders to make the right kind of sense out of them.

  ‘Imagine telling someone from outside, like me, how you sat still as a bird when you heard your neighbour being taken away. You didn’t breathe, you didn’t move. You edited yourself and fitted in and survived.’

  ‘Why do you want to make them talk?’ asked Adam.

  Joe smiled. ‘I’m writing a book.’

  ‘Is that a good enough reason?’

  ‘It has to be. It’s the only reason I’ve got. I’m not going to include all these personal stories, anyway. When people say to me, “You won’t put that in your book, will you?” I’m not lying when I say that I won’t, it’s between them and me. Their personal stories are all-important but they’re not usable. I need to know them. I need to understand what I can about what it was like to live then. I need to be able to go into those rooms of the past and walk around in the dark without bumping into the furniture.

  ‘I’ve got to get to where he was. The person at the heart of all that terror. Terror was the dominant emotion of the twentieth century and we don’t understand it.

  ‘I talked to a man whose mother was taken away when he was six. She was a minor Party official. When Stalin, Molotov and Yezhov made their speeches to the Central Committee at the plenary in February 1937, it became clear that it was people like her who were the targets now. The Party itself was going to be turned inside out and gutted. No Party member was safe.’

  He stood up, went to the window and stood there looking out. Olya had come in with glasses of tea which she placed on the low varnished table. I lifted my glass of tea, and drank.

  ‘She sleeps well,’ said Olya, nodding at Ruby. Both of us looked at Ruby in Adam’s arms, her closed, pearly eyelids with the faint blue veins, her pale cheeks, the curl of dark-red hair that clung to her forehead, damp with sweat. It was very hot in the apartment.

  Olya leaned over, unfastened the cardigan Ruby was wearing, and very carefully slid first one arm and then the other out of its sleeves. Her thick dark hair fell forward, touching Ruby’s cheeks, touching Adam’s clothes. Neither of them stirred. Olya slipped the cardigan off, and folded it neatly.

  ‘Olya likes babies,’ said Joe. He had turned away from the window and was watching us all. I couldn’t tell from his voice if he was praising Olya, or blaming her.

  ‘Yes, I like babies,’ said Olya. ‘They have something which other people don’t have any more.’ But she said it very quietly, as if she had to say the words but did not expect him to listen to them.

  ‘The man I spoke to,’ Joe continued, ‘he didn’t know anything about the speech to the Central Committee, or the beginning of the Yezhov terror. He was a child of six. What he knew was this. His mother lost her job. Suddenly she was at home in the apartment all the time. He knew something was wrong because of the terror that clung round her like a smell. She kept saying that things were fine, there was nothing the matter. He remembers being angry with her and asking why she didn’t go to work as usual. He remembers that she was sorting out his clothes, putting away his winter clothes and mending his summer ones, and she got out a pair of shorts he didn’t like and said it would do for another summer, and he was angry.

  ‘Then one day, quite early, she woke him up by kissing him. The smell of terror was stronger than ever. She kissed him and held him tight and he would like to remember that he kissed her back and clung to her but he knows that he didn’t. He said, “I want to go back to sleep, Mama, leave me alone,” and he turned over in the bed, away from her. He knew that she was still there bending over him, but he kept his eyes squeezed shut.

  ‘You already know what I’m going to say. That was the last time he saw her. They didn’t come for her in the night, they asked her to go in and answer a few questions, clarify a few points. She went on her own two legs, not taking anything with her.

  ‘She was too afraid to listen to the truth of that smell of terror that surrounded her and told her to put on her warmest underwear, take her spare glasses, stitch a photo of little Volodya into her knickers.

  ‘She went and she didn’t come back.

  ‘There he was, six years old. His father survived for the time being – he died later, in the war. But Volodya wasn’t sent to an orphanage, he kept his identity, he knew who he was. His grandmother took him, because his father thought he would be safer there.

  ‘Volodya blames himself. He has never stopped blaming himself for being bad-tempered with his mother that morning, for saying that he wanted to sleep. For not embracing her. For not looking up when she remained there, bending over his bed. For hearing the door close behind her, and turning over in his bed, back into the warmth of it, and going to sleep again. A child of six cannot forgive himself.

  ‘So, this is the furniture that’s got to be in the room when I write about Stalin’s fugue.’

  ‘He told you all those things,’ said Olya, ‘and yet you’re not going to put them in your book.’

  ‘I’ve told you
why.’

  ‘What happened to his mother will disappear, also,’ said Olya. ‘No one will remember it.’

  We were all silent for a while. I thought of Ruby in her bed, and the way I liked to sit beside her, when Adam was working and she was asleep. I thought of old gravestones and how they sometimes mark the deaths of children, one after another in the same family with the same first name, dying in their infancy. I thought about how we try to believe that parents then suffered less than we do, because they were accustomed to loss.

  But it isn’t so. We think it to comfort ourselves, but in thinking it we belittle them.

  Ruby stirred and gave a cat-like triangular yawn. Adam smiled and stroked her hair. I saw how he caught Olya’s eye. He had liked the way she noticed that Ruby was sweating, and the sure and gentle way she’d taken off Ruby’s cardigan. I looked at Olya and Adam and thought that they were similar people. They might belong together, in another world.

  But they did not belong together. It was Adam who could make me ache and feel the rich darkness unfold to let us down into it. It was my child he had on his lap.

  ‘So,’ said Joe. ‘Here we have him. It’s a beautiful summer day and he’s out at the dacha. The German army is advancing into Soviet territory at fantastic, unexpected speed.

  ‘Unexpected, that is, unless you are Stalin and you’ve had accurate, detailed intelligence about German troop movements, weaponry concentrations, overflights of Soviet territory, and plans for invasion after the spring planting. For months and months you’ve been getting warnings from the highest levels. Some of them have come direct from the German military itself.

  ‘You’ve ignored it all, and that looks like the act of a fool. But you’re not a fool. You are Stalin. You are a cunning, manipulative, highly skilled strategist. You grasp situations and you act: that’s why you are where you are, and why you’ve stayed there, at the top.

  ‘So let’s say that you were trying to gain time. You thought that you could stave off the German attack for a few vital months, by pretending to believe it was not imminent, by not allowing yourself to be provoked into action.

  ‘But you didn’t prepare. You didn’t do what was necessary. Or maybe you’d won so many battles that you simply could not believe that this time you would lose, and that Hitler would be even more cunning, more ruthless, more manipulative than you. That he would succeed, and you would fail.

  ‘Khrushchev says that when the invasion came you cried out: “All that Lenin created we have lost for ever.”

  ‘Did you really say that? Or was Khrushchev remembering those nights when he had to dance a Cossack dance with his buttocks almost touching the floor? All that Lenin created we have lost for ever.’

  I could see that Olya didn’t like it when Joe talked like that, as if Stalin was still here with us and might answer him. Even to me it seemed like bad luck. The bones of some men don’t lie as still as they should.

  ‘Too many questions,’ said Olya. ‘People read histories in order to hear answers.’

  ‘You’re wrong, Olya,’ said Joe passionately. ‘You are completely wrong and you don’t understand why I am writing this book. People will read it in order to know what the right questions are. They’ll read it in order to go into those rooms and know where the light switch is, even though it’s dark.’

  ‘Maybe I’m wrong,’ said Olya. ‘But it’s my history you’re writing about.’

  ‘A man like Stalin belongs to all of us,’ said Joe. ‘He couldn’t have been what he was without the permission of the whole world. Think of the Yalta Conference.’

  ‘Oh my God,’ said Olya, getting up again. ‘Why should I think about the Yalta Conference, or about any of it? I don’t have to think about any of it any more, don’t you understand? Nobody can make me learn those parts of the history books if I don’t want to. Why should I give such a man space inside my head?’

  ‘He’s there already,’ said Joe. ‘He’s in all our heads. He’s colonized our minds. We haven’t begun to understand Stalin yet, or Hitler. We’re still reacting to the blows, that’s all. We are still staggering from them.’

  Adam was drinking more vodka. Away from the hospital, relaxed, holding Ruby, he was letting himself drink far more than usual. His face was smudged and softened. Maybe he was listening to Joe, maybe he wasn’t. He and Ruby together, her skin like his for all its baby pearliness. Mine was darker. His red curls, her red curls with their blue shine. There was a touch of sun in the afternoon light and it shone through the dirty double windows and onto their hair. They were beautiful together.

  ‘No phone,’ I said aloud.

  ‘Of course, there is a phone,’ said Olya quickly and a bit indignantly.

  ‘No. I meant no phone that will ring for Adam. No calls from the hospital.’

  He’ll be at peace, I meant. No one can touch us here.

  Adam smiled, and held out his hand to me, from far away. I leaned across the sofa and touched his fingers, but they were soft and unresponsive. He was a little drunk, and happy. Now Olya was watching him, too.

  ‘A man who was afraid of poison,’ said Joe. ‘He’d lost a lot of weight and looked skinny and shaky and old. A man who would go on the radio for the first time early in July, nearly two weeks after the invasion, speaking with marked hesitation, loudly drinking water in the pauses. He would sound shaky. A man whose hands sweated, so that when he handled documents he left oily marks on them. Maybe one day I’ll be holding a document and I’ll see those oily traces and I’ll know who read it before me, who put his mark on it.

  ‘But a clever man. Never, never to be underestimated. What I’m interested in is why he lost himself during those few days, and where he went. What he ate, who he talked to, where he walked, what he knew and what he didn’t know. What he thought about. What he believed would happen, now that the German army was on the move, with its superior equipment and the element of surprise on its side.

  ‘But Stalin hadn’t been surprised. He’d been shocked, that’s something else. He’d seen the surprise coming miles off, but the shock was that Hitler had dared to rouse him, as no one for years had dared to rouse him.

  ‘You have to think of a cunning man, a fanatically suspicious man, as suspicious of being fed false information as he was of being fed poisoned food. A man whose wife had killed herself and left a letter which scorched his spirit for the rest of his life.

  ‘Was Stalin really cornered when he went out to the dacha and disappeared from public life? No, I’m not sure. Maybe it was more like a body in crisis. The way the body can shut down most of its functions so that the vital ones are preserved. So that it keeps on living. Maybe, with most of his life shut down, Stalin could think at triple speed –’

  ‘My God,’ said Olya, ‘my God, Joe, you are making my head hurt.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Olyenka,’ said Joe, and he passed his hand over her thick black hair. The touch made it clear to me that there would be no babies for Olya from Joe. He stroked her hair as if it were beautiful fur.

  It was almost dark. I wanted to take Ruby on my lap, to feel the warmth and weight of her pinning me down.

  I thought of the little boy whose mother had gone. Volodya. Six years old. Maybe he went back to sleep again, after the door closed behind his mother. When he woke, the daylight was strong. He sat bolt upright in bed, completely awake. He listened for her footsteps, but they didn’t come.

  ‘Give Ruby to me,’ I said to Adam. He stood up carefully, so as not to wake her. He laid her down on my lap, inside the shape of my arms. Ruby stiffened, then relaxed.

  ‘My two darlings,’ said Adam. His voice was so quiet no one else in the room would have heard it. My whole body flooded with happiness and I looked down so that he wouldn’t see the tears in my eyes. I thought that this was why we had come to Moscow, though we hadn’t known it. We had come to be loosened from ourselves, to hear of griefs that were larger than our own, to be able to say those sweet words that so often stuck on our tongues.

/>   13

  Barnoon is Heaven

  beautiful today the surf on Porthkidney sands

  and the standing out of the lighthouse, sheer

  because of the rain past, the rain to come, the rain

  Adam’s gran was a girl from St Ives. Her daughter married Adam’s father, who was Jewish and gave Adam the red hair that darkened into Ruby’s curls. Adam’s parents met in London, during the war. Everyone was leaving their homes then and the old links were broken. They came together in a rented flat in Primrose Hill.

  His gran is buried in Barnoon Cemetery, overlooking the sea. We found her grave and stood beside it, reading the lettering. It had long ago lost the raw look of death. It was settled into the earth and the wind and light played around it in a jewel-like way I had never seen in any other graveyard. Most graveyards collect darkness, but this one collected light.

  Adam’s father was irreligious in a Jewish way, like Adam. Adam’s mother had been brought up a Methodist, but after she was twenty she had no time for it.

  ‘But she never told my gran that,’ said Adam. ‘She didn’t want to upset her. My gran had a hard life and the chapel kept her going.’

  I liked to hear of all these things being carried on in the bloodstream. Adam reached so easily into his past, and pulled down handfuls of history. My gran, my great-granddad, he said. He knew them on both sides, back and back. He had documents as well as stories, he had buildings where they’d lived, and gravestones. Adam had told Joe those stories once, and Joe had listened intently. I watched Joe soaking them up in the way he absorbed material he might one day use. Joe saw me looking, he saw me frowning maybe, warning him off. But he only smiled, a faint, sweet smile. You know me, Rebecca. You know how I am.

  Adam’s ancestors would be Ruby’s, too. She would pass through my historyless body and come into her inheritance. When she could speak, she would be able to say, My gran. My great-granddad.