“It makes all the difference.” She took his face in her hands. “You know this.”
And even if she loved him, even if she forgave him, she’d never be dissuaded from that bedrock of faith. And he could never survive on that shore.
“I think—I’m tired,” he said. Her fingers slipped away.
“Of course.” She patted him on the shoulder, then kissed him lightly on the head. She said something about buying some food for them, preparing dinner.
He didn’t know what to tell her. Then he thought of a lie.
“I will be out later,” he said.
“That’s fine,” she said. “Whenever you return.”
“I don’t know when I’ll be back.”
He didn’t know what she’d registered from this. He couldn’t bring himself to look at her. The room was quiet. Then, after a moment, as though she’d come to some greater understanding, her words took on more certainty. “That’s fine.”
She made some excuse for her departure. He didn’t press her. He suspected whatever her reasons, they were truthful; she would not leave with even the smallest lie between them.
He nodded and closed his eyes.
The latch clicked softly. He listened to her steps on the stairs; to the outer door close. The building seemed abandoned.
He was free to do whatever he liked. He was free to do nothing.
He opened his eyes. A sunny room awaited him.
CHAPTER 9
Outside Bulgakov’s apartment, she turned left rather than right, which would have taken her toward the streetcars on Tverskaya Street. This seemed a kind of act of defiance, though of what or who seemed vague. After several blocks she came upon Patriarch’s Ponds. Any other day, she’d have continued past, not being one to sit idly in a park. She ignored the path and cut across the damp grass; she took an empty bench. The afternoon was already hot again despite the recent rain. The sun, low over her shoulder, seemed directed solely upon her. The water before her occasionally rippled; from the random fish, she guessed; there was no wind. The seat was uncomfortable. No one else was around.
An orange beetle crawled near her thigh. She offered the tip of her finger and it climbed onto it. As she lifted it, it raised its capelike wings and took to the air.
Why writers, she thought. Why did she think they might be actual human beings?
A man came from behind and sat on the end of the bench. She straightened a little; the slats of the seat were uneven and pressed anew. She recognized him as the man from the restaurant. What was his name? She wished he would go away. If she had wanted to cry, and she wasn’t certain she did, she couldn’t now.
If he noticed her displeasure, he said nothing of it.
She remembered: Ilya Ivanovich.
“Your poet, Anna Akhmatova, her son was arrested today,” he said.
She’d met him once—Lev Gumilev; he’d seemed a teenager at the time. That was several years ago. First Osip, then Bulgakov—there was the wreckage of his apartment—something had happened to him, she was certain. Now this. All seemed to be circling. “Why—what did he do?”
He leaned forward, his hands clasped. He stared at the water.
“Nothing.” He turned his head slightly. “He’s her son. That is his misfortune.”
Before she could say anything, he continued.
“They will exile him.” As if anticipating her question. “They will keep him alive. It should keep her in line.”
She imagined Anna—the mother’s reaction. My son—my boy! She remembered her from the Writers’ Union. She would do whatever was necessary to maintain him. Everything that was necessary. There would be no question.
She thought of Osip. Should he be released, there would be the need to keep him in line.
She thought to ask how he knew. Of course there were only a few ways he could know.
There seemed then a growing acuity for her surroundings—the sunlight that glittered on the water became crystalline; from somewhere came the sound of its trickling; leaves which had hung limply from the tree branches now seemed cut with the precision of knives. The air itself nudged her skin into alertness; the hair on her arms rose. She was sitting next to someone dangerous. Dangerous in a way that was particular to her. She was afraid to look at him in case she might reveal this knowledge; she stared at the pond until her eyes began to water.
She wondered—was this a warning or a confession? She took care in the words she chose. “Why are you telling me this?”
“I don’t know,” he said. There was a mild incredulity in his voice, as if something unexpected had broken the pond’s surface.
In the water, near its far edge, several feet from shore, the heat of the afternoon seemed to give shape to a figure. It blurred, then drew clear again. There were arms, a head; it floundered then sank. She started to stand.
“It’s a child,” she said. “There’s a child, drowning! There!” She hurried around the pond’s perimeter, vaguely aware he was following her. She watched the spot where she’d seen him. A boy, she thought. Playing too close to the edge. He’d gone in after a toy. The muck of the bottom had trapped his feet; he’d lost his balance and the water closed over him. Where was his parent? She came up and stared into it. The water was still. It reflected only sky. Ilya came beside her.
“He was here,” she said, pointing. “Here. I saw him. He’s gone.”
“No one’s here, Margarita,” he said.
“He was here! I saw him!” She started in and he held her arm. He waded into the water and crouched low, spreading his arms below the surface as he went, searching. Water splashed noisily.
From a nearby kiosk, a woman’s voice called over.
“There is no swimming in the pond, Citizen. Remove yourself immediately!”
He turned slowly, toward the voice. The woman stood a little ways from her stand and pointed at one of the many small signs placed around the water’s edge.
“Do I look like I’m swimming?” he said to the woman.
“There was a boy,” said Margarita. “A boy in the water.”
The woman looked at her strangely. “There’s been no boy. There’s been no one. I’ve been here alone.”
Ilya stood, the water came to mid-thigh, and he made his way to the edge. The top of his coat from the neck up was still dry, the rest below was flattened against his torso and a much darker grey. He seemed younger than before. Younger and more vulnerable.
The woman returned to her stand.
“I thought there was a boy,” said Margarita. Ilya stood dripping next to her.
She tried to recall her vision of him but it was gone too, as if her memory had allied itself with Ilya and the woman. The water was silent, ripples from Ilya’s movements reflected back from its edge and moved unhindered toward the center.
“When is the last time you ate something?” he asked her. When she didn’t answer, he took her arm and led her to the stand. The woman stood waiting with an annoyed expression. All she could offer was apricot juice and it was warm. Ilya insisted she drink it. It was overly sweet like a child’s medicine and she felt queasy, but he appeared quite earnest. Its frothy surface clung to her lips and when she wiped them, it stained her hand. He seemed pleased with her efforts. It gave her the hiccups.
Bulgakov rose and went to the table. He took a clean page from his folder and wrote a sentence:
Early in the morning on the fourteenth day of the spring month of Nisan, along the roofed colonnade that connected to two wings of the palace of Herod the Great, walked the procurator of Judea, Pontius Pilate.
His thoughts went to Margarita. Perhaps she had returned to her apartment; perhaps to the market first and then home. In his vision she had discounted him already. He’d done little damage. He saw her as she waited in a queue; behind her someone asked a question. It was a younger man, someone her ow
n age. Something about directions—she gestured as she described the route. Bulgakov knew the man wasn’t listening to her; the man watched her speak and was thinking instead of something else to ask her, something to keep her talking. As she spoke he moved a little closer; she would notice this, she’d suspect his interest, but his smile was warm and she didn’t move away. This was how people talked to one another. They would keep speaking and around them common ground would form. This was how it was done.
Bulgakov placed his face down on the desk, his forehead against the page. As if he could take the words directly from his cranium and impart them there. As if he could be spared the need to think any of it through.
They were on a different bench than before. Ilya laid his raincoat over the back of it to dry. Each seemed lost in thought. She could provide no reason for why they’d stayed. Perhaps he was still concerned about her; the juice had helped. Soon his clothes would be dry. Soon they would leave, each in their own direction; they would part ways forever and she’d carry her knowledge of him with her.
“Why writers?” he asked her.
At first she was uncertain of what he was asking; then she understood this was about her romantic involvements. She wanted to say there was no particular reason. She stared at the water.
She wanted to correct him by saying Bulgakov hadn’t been a romantic involvement.
Perhaps his question was a caution. She was reminded of the danger she’d felt before; the sensation was now a memory. She no longer felt any particular threat. She looked at his hand where it rested on his thigh. It was large and angular. It seemed itself a self-aware organ. She could envision it nesting a fledging bird; in her imagining his fingers curved around it, protectively. The bird’s eyes in its downy face were black beads. It looked about, uncertain, yet not altogether protesting. Then, as though without reflection on their intent, the fingers closed in and broke the creature’s neck.
He moved his hand to the bench between them and she jumped a little. He didn’t appear to notice.
This was a man who represented everything she detested. Yet here they sat together. The sun showed no preference toward one over the other. The universe itself seemed ambivalent of them: one might survive, one might not; it was all the same. She’d not given thought to the concept of God in many years, yet He seemed at that moment to be utterly remote—not even a pinprick in the sky. It was easy to believe that He didn’t have a preference either.
This was a man who was everything she detested. She didn’t know the specifics of his involvement in the arrests of Mandelstam or Lev Gumilev—or others—but she could assume the worst. Yet she remained; she shared this bench with him. This planking, this park, this sun, this sky. Was he only an emptiness that was capable of intolerable deeds? What was missing in her that she didn’t immediately leave?
Perhaps God was there, only silent. Silent and curious.
Ilya seemed to be waiting. She was about to answer as she’d first thought: there was no particular reason. But he spoke again.
“It makes it harder for the rest of us, you know.”
His question hadn’t been a caution.
His hand remained, resting against the plank. She watched it as one might a wild animal; something not inherently dangerous or with malice, but nevertheless unpredictable. She could be drawn to it, she thought, and she was surprised by this. Perhaps it gave some license for her own wildness.
Would she risk the touch of his hand on her neck just to feel it there?
It would be the heat and lack of food that turned her thoughts so strangely. When she looked down again, his hand was in his pocket and she was given over to the sense of something being forgotten or mislaid. Or something imagined; yet wholly unobtainable, just the same.
She expected never to see him again after that afternoon.
PART II
NEVER TALK TO STRANGERS
CHAPTER 10
In the early years, the artists and intelligentsia were eager to remake the world in their leaders’ vision. It was the dawn of a new century; the climax of a millennium. They weren’t just Bolsheviks; they were Modernists, Futurists, Constructionists. The Ivan Ilychs of their past with their caged canaries and dusty rubber plants were to be plowed under in the building of a steel-girded utopia. The writer and poet Vladimir Mayakovsky believed the Revolution had quickened their future. His play, Mystery Bouffe, produced in 1918, dramatized the conquest of the clean and proper bourgeois by the grimy, stubble-faced proletariat. At its climax, the audience joined the cast onstage and with them destroyed the theatre curtain that had been painted with symbols of the old world. Spoke Diaghilev in 1905, “We are witnesses of the greatest moment of summing up in history, in the name of a new and unknown culture, which will be created by us, and which will also sweep us away. That is why, with fear or misgiving, I raise my glass to the ruined walls of the beautiful palaces, as well as to the new commandments of a new aesthetic.”
In early spring of 1930 Mayakovsky was found in his apartment with a gunshot wound to his head. His death was labeled a suicide. In the previous year, he’d published a dazzling satire on Soviet behavior and bureaucracy, and was immediately damned by the authorities. His detractors concluded he’d be neither relevant nor even circulated in twenty years’ time.
In his apartment that morning, the agent in attendance pressed the revolver’s barrel against the writer’s temple, then angled it slightly back, toward the opposite ear, to assure the kill. The writer’s eyes bulged forward; his pupils darted repeatedly as if he needed to see the thing. He no longer made sense. Most pleaded until the end. This one instead over and over repeated, until there was only a mutter of words:
What did it matter?
The agent disliked poets in particular. Pick something, he told him. He thumped the table; it was strewn with handwritten pages.
The writer looked down, then seemed to understand. His suicide note.
What did it matter? The words softened to a chant. His hand touched a page, then moved to another, as if trying to recall something forgotten. He picked up his pen and added a line. He held it for a moment longer as he read over the words.
Mayakovsky looked at the agent and mouthed the question one final time. Only the question had changed. There was the smell of gunpowder and burnt skin. Eyes turned skyward. He fell from the gun’s barrel as if indeed it’d been holding him up all along.
The poet’s final question had been genuine. It was the one they all asked.
When did he stop loving me?
Stalin kept the poet’s original note in the side drawer of his personal desk until his death in 1953.
Years later it was revealed that the apartment where Mayakovsky had been found had had a secret entrance within a closet. His lover Lily Brik had been an informant for Stalin’s political police. The poet’s death tolled throughout literary Russia with an unmistakable voice: there was no place in Soviet literature for the individualist. The land that had borne Pushkin and Gogol, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Chekhov and Pasternak, fell silent.
It was Bulgakov’s third banquet in as many months; these were Party affairs and though he was not a Party member it would be ill-conceived to decline the invitation. He had drunk too much at the last one and his suit jacket had disappeared from the back of his chair. He cursed himself for this; it’d been his second best, so when the invitation for the next banquet came on its heels and his other jacket was still with the laundry woman, he was left with his third, which, upon inspection, could hardly be called a jacket but perhaps the ghost of one, the fabric along its back seam so threadbare as to rip with the slightest pressure. He decided to wear his overcoat instead. The room would be dark, he determined, and once the liquor was flowing no one would notice or care.
This one was in honor of the novelist Poprikhen. Some newly-hatched award for his most recent effort. Bulgakov had written a letter to the editor of Croc
odile in praise of it. He’d written many such letters, opining on the works of his various contemporaries and was surprised at the ease with which they made their way into print. He was also surprised by his colleagues’ reactions. At the Writers’ Union, he had become someone to know. Introductions and invitations flew about—“Gregor, Gregor! You must meet Mikhail Bulgakov—Come! Oh wait, you’ve missed him, but here he comes again from the bar, and this time you will have your chance.” “Bulgakov—my man, next summer when we open up the dacha you will join us—now don’t shake your head! Irini—my dear, didn’t he promise? See—you’ve promised; my wife has the memory of an elephant. We have the best chef in the district—you will be as fat as a bathtub when you return—I promise you!”
Despite his frequent attendance at the Writers’ Union, he never saw her there. From time to time he would scan the room, registering each figure anew as though it was possible his memory might misrepresent her. He wondered if she was avoiding him. He could have gone to her apartment and he reasoned that he’d been busy with the novel and the play, yet in truth, he was anxious of her response. He could imagine her under his arm; he looked about at the women near him who wished they occupied that spot, and he remembered her face from the vestibule of Mandelstam’s apartment. Her careful apportionment of hope and distrust. Would it now be entirely distrust? When it was determined that his play would be reinstated at the MAT, he sent her tickets to its opening. It was months away, but he liked to imagine her there in the seat he’d chosen, her face illuminated by the lights of the stage. He could wish she might come alone, but he doubted it, and had sent her a pair of them as a way of demonstrating this kind of understanding. He didn’t allow himself the hope of her coming to find him backstage afterward, pressing her hand upon his arm, revealing in her eyes the wonder at what genius he’d achieved. He imagined theirs was a different kind of communion. It existed on a higher dimension.
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