Mourning Ruby

by Helen Dunmore

  Adam shakes his head. He can’t leave. He can’t stand up or walk through the café or go out into the bright street. It’s coming over him, a rush, an acceleration he can’t stop.

  Pascal rises from his chair and comes round to stand behind Adam, his hands on Adam’s shoulders, pressing, holding him down safe. Adam’s breath tears in his chest as if they’re still running, at another pace that no one can stand for long. His breath forces its way out of him and the noise of it is loud in his head.

  It’s early. There are not many customers in the café. An old woman in a woolly hat who notices nothing, a pair of working men who glance at Adam and Pascal and then down at their newspapers again. The dark-haired thin little girl stops rubbing her windows. She stands there, not sure what to do, with her cloth in her hand. She comes over to Adam and Pascal.

  ‘Is he all right?’ she asks timidly. Pascal shakes his head.

  ‘His little girl has died,’ says Pascal.

  Adam hears those words. His little girl has died. That’s what Pascal said. Pascal didn’t say when Ruby died, or that it was three years ago now and Adam’s getting over it although, of course, a thing like that, you never really –

  His little girl has died.

  Always, over and over, in her everlasting present, Ruby dies. She curls her hand into his, she tucks her thumb into her palm and her skin is sweaty but she’s not embarrassed at all because she’s only five and what she wants is to hold her father’s hand. Her hand melts into him, her sweat is like balm.

  ‘My hands are sweaty, aren’t they, Dad?’ she says, looking up at him.

  The mug shakes on the table top and the tea spills because Adam’s body is shaking the chair and the chair is touching the table. Pascal lifts the mug and gives it to the girl who is still standing there, cloth in one hand. She dabs at the table with her cloth.

  ‘I’ll get you some more tea,’ she says.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ says Adam. ‘I’m sorry, Pascal, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry –’

  He hears the echo in his head. Rebecca said that. She wept and he listened but he couldn’t weep. She sat in Ruby’s bedroom and he told her she must stop sitting there. In the dark and smell of Ruby she was happy, she said. He was afraid it was becoming an obsession. He asked her if she would see the counsellor who worked with parents after a baby in the unit died. Not the blonde counsellor, a different one. This one was good, he said, but Rebecca stared at him as if he was trying to steal something from her. As if Ruby was still in her arms and he was trying to take her. But it hadn’t been like that. They buried Ruby together. He carried her in the light woodland box made of compressed cardboard and she weighed enough to bow his back.

  He can feel her weight. His shoulders hurt. It’s not finished, he’s not at the end of something or even beginning to get there. It is all still to come, only now beginning and he hasn’t felt it yet. He’s like a man who has put his hand into a fire and stares at it for the first second and feels nothing.

  ‘We’ll go home now,’ says Pascal.

  Adam walks around his house. It’s full of soft afternoon light now. He’s far away from himself after so many hours of grief. Grunts and salt and mucus and tearing sounds he would never have believed would come from his throat. His pillow is wet. He pulls off the pillowcase and the pillow itself is wet with mucus and tears. He wonders if it can be washed, or only the pillowcase. Rebecca would know.

  Pascal brought him to the house and then went away, back to Marie-Louise, as Adam wanted. He would have stayed, but Adam didn’t want him to do that. Pascal’s life was separate. He had his own things to deal with. And besides, Marie-Louise was pregnant.

  Rebecca never saw him cry. He touches the head of the bed that he and Rebecca shared. Rebecca chose it. She polished the wood with beeswax and it still has that deep, complicated shine. There is a pattern of fig leaves cut into the wood. Adam traces the pattern with his finger and it seems to burn, so clear it is, so intentional in its design.

  Adam walks into Ruby’s bedroom. There are no curtains at the window now, so the room is full of sun. The curtains with the dolphins on them have gone to the charity shop in a black binbag. There’s a white, quilted mattress protector on her narrow bed. He sits in the shabby little blue armchair where Rebecca used to sit when Ruby was a baby, feeding her. He can’t picture them any more but he can remember the smell of the baby’s room at night. Rebecca’s milk had a sweet, thick taste. He tasted it, too. They’d intended to re-cover that little chair for Ruby, but they never got round to it.

  The room is quite empty. He walks around it and because there is so little furniture and the boards are bare, it makes the echoing sound of a room in a house for sale. An expectant sound. Rebecca sat here in the dark waiting for Ruby and he told her she must stop. She must give up her obsession. She was damaging herself. But here he is himself, far behind her, only now beginning to mourn.

  His little girl has died.

  Not a year before or three years before. Not a second ago. But now. Now. He goes to the window. There is the pear tree. There at the top of the garden are his earnest, laughable vegetable plots. There’s the shed with Ruby’s Lego hidden beneath it.

  ‘Wait for me, Rebecca,’ he says, without realizing he was going to say it. ‘I won’t be long.’

  He throws up the sash window so that the air can flood in and at that moment the doorbell rings. His heart leaps in his throat, with terror, or with hope maybe, that it’s her, she’s heard him and already she’s here as if there’s no distance or time between them. The bell rings again.

  Down the stairs, and then he steps lightly across the hall floor, as if what might be there might also be scared. As if it might run at the sound of his footsteps.

  But there they are. Pascal and Marie-Louise, side by side, their faces breaking into relief as he opens the door. And he sees at once that of course Marie-Louise is pregnant. How could he have missed it?

  ‘We’ve come to fetch you,’ says Pascal.

  ‘You are having dinner with us,’ says Marie-Louise, ‘and after that we’re all going to the cinema. And then you are sleeping at our house.’ She waits for a beat, smiling at him, and then says, ‘Please,’ and takes his hand in her own dry, warm hand, and continues to hold it.

  21

  The Moscow Veteran

  And to get to him – to his very heart –

  without papers I entered the Kremlin…

  The man sat or perhaps was propped – he had no legs – on a flat wooden trolley. One arm was whole and perfect, the other ended below the elbow. He wore military uniform and his eyes were a startling pale blue. Linen blue. In his good hand he held a cup for money.

  Automatically, Joe shelled a few coins into the cup. The man’s eyes caught him and he stopped. Suddenly it seemed wrong, brutal almost, to drop the coins in the cup and walk on as he had done dozens and dozens of times before. He knew what the man’s story would be. There was nothing to say, no advice to offer. He would be a veteran of the war in Afghanistan with a veteran’s pension which was now worth close to nothing. There was no money for a wheelchair. He had his wooden trolley. He had nothing to gain from talking to Joe. And yet…

  An old woman hobbled past and dropped a few kopeks into the cup. Her pension, too, would be worth almost nothing. But these old women never passed the veterans without giving a coin. And they would always speak to them. ‘There you are, son, God will bless you. God will reward you.’

  There was no stopping these old women from talking about God now. They packed the churches, and young men and women packed them too, carefully following rituals relearned after decades of disuse. The young women covered their hair, the young men bared their heads.

  The old woman made the sign of the cross and fumbled in her worn-out purse for the last coin. She had everything God needed in order to exist, Joe thought. Poverty and innocence and goodness and lack of hope for anything on earth. What she and all the other old women had always believed had turned out
to be true. Earth was a vale of suffering, fitfully illuminated by acts of kindness such as a stallholder tipping an extra chicken foot into the scale. But this almost never happened and could not be counted on. Only God, suffering, united himself with your sufferings…

  ‘Take this, son, God will reward you.’

  ‘Have a drink,’ said Joe, and dropped in more money, rouble notes this time, enough for a bottle of vodka. The man raised his eyes and scanned the face that Joe knew would always bear an expression that marked him as not from these parts.

  ‘You’re not from round here, are you?’

  ‘No. English. But I live here in Moscow.’

  The man’s blue eyes held Joe’s.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m a writer. I do my research here. I’m writing a book about Stalin.’

  ‘About Iosif Vissarionovich?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘There’s a real man for you. If we’d had him in charge I wouldn’t be sitting here.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘We didn’t lose wars in Iosif Vissarionovich’s time. Plus, you never saw a soldier begging in the streets. Write that in your book.’

  The blue eyes went wan. He was tired, in pain.

  Everything had moved on, but not him. The war he’d fought was history, a failure, not a victory. Everyone was glad to forget it, and glad too that now the West was getting a good taste of it and understanding what the war had been about and why it had had to be fought.

  He was tired and maybe the phantom legs hurt, and the phantom hand. The wooden trolley looked homemade. It must be hell to sit on. How many hours would he sit here?

  ‘You done your military service?’

  ‘We don’t have it in my country.’

  The man shook his head slightly, incredulously. ‘You were a student, right?’

  ‘No, it wasn’t because of that. No one does military service in Britain. It’s been abolished.’

  But he could see that the veteran didn’t believe him. Joe was just another example of the smart ones, the ones with money and education and pull, getting out of what poor kids got stuck with.

  Joe felt the fat of his wallet knocking inside his breast pocket. The urge burned in him to give and go on giving until it was all gone. And then walk home with his head bowed, without enough money for the metro.

  The notes he’d given were plenty. Any more and the man would think he was crazy. And people would notice. There were always pickpockets hanging around.

  Joe felt inside his breast pocket. Without removing the wallet, he opened it. The wad of notes was between his fingers. It wasn’t a fortune. Enough for a meal out with Olya at the good pasta place on the Arbat. Folding his hand over the notes he bent down.

  ‘Here. Take this.’

  The man glanced at the edge of the notes as he swallowed them into his one remaining hand, and then disappeared them inside his clothes. It was so quick that for a second Joe stopped believing he’d given the money at all.

  The man looked up. The pallor of his eyes. His skin. He looked terrible.

  ‘Someone comes and takes you home?’ asked Joe.

  ‘Yeah. Someone comes. You’re crazy.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Joe. But he said it formally. Forgive me. I have a bank account and a credit card and an apartment and a passport. If I want I can be on a plane to England tomorrow. I can slip out of everything that holds you.

  Joe walked on. That old woman scouring her purse had done more than him. The flowing crowds of passers-by opened and absorbed him. Everyone in the world seemed to be walking. Joe felt flimsy and he knew it showed from the way he was jostled aside. He was in Moscow but not of Moscow, passing his life as an observer. Olya had gone to see her sister in Yaroslavl. She would be back – when? Five or six days. Olya wasn’t happy. Her sister would be saying to her that she should leave Joe. That it would be a big step but that in the end Olya would be happier. Joe would never give her what she wanted. And Olya would smile at her sister with her dark, soft, unhappy eyes and say, ‘You don’t understand our relationship.’ Olya would come back tender and remorseful towards Joe, as if she had somehow betrayed him by talking of him.

  She should leave me, thought Joe, walking. It would be better for her. She wants –

  She wants what? We call it wanting children but it’s not really that at all. We could have a child but that wouldn’t make things better, in fact it would make them worse. What she wants doesn’t exist, at least it doesn’t exist in me any more. To tell you brutally, Olya, it’s been given away already, to someone else. And I can’t get it back, not because I don’t want to, but because there are some things you can’t do twice.

  You’re not from round here, are you?

  No. I’m not from these parts.

  He would walk on. He would get a ticket and go into the Kremlin with the holiday crowds. He’d thought he was walking aimlessly but of course he wasn’t, his body knew where it was taking him.

  He’d only been back to England once since Ruby’s funeral. He’d seen Rebecca then. He knew where she was now, because she’d kept in touch. She always did that, he always knew where she was. Once, out of the blue, she sent a long email about the flat they’d shared and about the meals they cooked and how far away it seemed, like another world. Now she worked for a guy who owned hotels and she was travelling the world and it was good for her, the best thing for her now. Or so she wrote. But as far as Joe could see both she and Adam were still in shock, blundering about, saying things they didn’t mean and doing things they didn’t understand. Or they were like people who have been shot and will fall any second but don’t know it yet.

  It must have been a shell that blew off that blue-eyed veteran’s legs. Or maybe a landmine. He wouldn’t have known what was happening, at the moment of it. To see and feel your body explode – that’s impossible. I am losing my legs, my hand. Nobody thinks that. They will say it afterwards, in the past tense, but it takes a long time.

  What a colour his eyes were.

  The things that Olya wanted from him no longer existed. He had given them to Rebecca and they were gone. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. Most of the things he read in newspapers and magazines and novels supported the idea that relationships had a life like fruit or flowers. They germinated, they bloomed and ripened, they died and left space for the next one to grow. Sometimes the process was ugly and painful but this was more or less how it worked.

  But for him it hadn’t been true. There wasn’t anything left to grow. He had loved Rebecca with –

  (He had never even slept with her. Not really. It was years since they’d dismantled the flat. Men don’t behave like this, they move on.)

  With his whole heart, that’s what he’d loved her with. That’s why Olya couldn’t find it, that’s why she was unhappy and had these long conversations with her sister that he wasn’t supposed to know about.

  ‘He’s not cold, no, I know he’s not cold but there’s something I just can’t get past…’

  ‘He’s English, Olyenka.’

  ‘…and to get to him – to his very heart–’

  Joe repeated the lines to himself. Mandelstam wrote them in Voronezh, the city of ravens, in exile, in February 1937. He would die at the end of the following year, following his second arrest. He would be last seen picking over a rubbish heap in a transit camp at Vladivostock. He was writing in those lines about Stalin, the man who would murder him. Maybe he was trying to save his own life, maybe he was trying to understand the murder inside Stalin’s heart. His heart of hearts.

  Joe walked faster, head bowed, trying to imagine what it was like to be inside the writer of the poem, who tried to imagine inside Stalin’s heart as Joe has tried to imagine inside Stalin’s heart. But there was no comparison between Mandelstam and Joe. No contest. Mandelstam had to understand Stalin with his own life. And I get paid for my understanding, thought Joe. People buy it. His book about the death of Nadezhda Alliluyeva has sold well.

 
; But it wasn’t easy to get away from Nadya, even after the book was published. She still possessed him, even though he was supposed to have moved on from her. He was writing of Stalin at war, Stalin in fugue. He had intended to go on. He’d wanted to write of Stalin at the end of his life. Stalin, toxic with rage, suspicion and the terror of death. When he died his face bore an expression which no one who saw it was able to forget or to describe as it deserved. At last, Stalin got the face he earned, perhaps. And Stalin’s arm, the arm crippled in childhood by a blow from his father, was raised to ward off death.

  But in his heart Joe kept going back to the earlier days. He could not get away from the image of Nadya as a young woman in the heart of the Kremlin, mother of two children and stepmother of a son, on the night of 8 November. She and Stalin have just celebrated the fifteenth anniversary of the October Revolution. There’s been a party at the apartment of their friends the Voroshilovs.

  Power was all so recent for them, thought Joe. It must have seemed so fragile still. Like found money. The Revolution only fifteen years behind them. These comrades, these people who envisaged a different world, have got what they wanted. They are the masters now. Sometimes, at these parties, they must have looked at each other, incredulous. Here they were, against all the odds, in the heart of the Kremlin and with their hands on its ropes of power. What they don’t yet fully realize is that those ropes will drag them, too. They will be taken to places where they don’t want to go, and they’ll do things of which they would never have believed themselves capable.

  At the party that night, there’s a row. Something between man and wife made ugly and magnified a hundred times by the fact that nothing is simply between man and wife any more. A man shouts insults, a woman runs from the room. But the man’s Stalin and the woman is Nadya, who is now thirty-one and who loved her husband so passionately at seventeen that all her family were afraid for her. They knew it wasn’t healthy to love like that, crazily, with no barriers, nothing held back, nowhere to retreat to if it all went wrong. There was nowhere in Nadya’s body or her heart or her mind that he hadn’t penetrated and made his own. Her family knew her nature and her seriousness and idealism. The way she made him perfect in her own mind so that he was the ideal revolutionary who would lead her, along with the whole of his people.