Lara

by Anna Pasternak

  Olga was kept in solitary confinement for three days, during which time she ‘crossed the fateful boundary, the Rubicon which divides ordinary humans from prisoners’. She was finally moved after she ripped off the hem of her dress, put it around her neck and began to try to pull the fabric up towards her ears. The fact that two guards instantly burst into her cell and hauled her down a long corridor before pushing her into a larger cell proves that she was under constant surveillance. For now, the authorities wanted her alive.

  Her new cell – Cell No 7 – contained fourteen other women. As she looked around, she saw that the beds were screwed to the parquet floor and had ‘good’ mattresses on them. The women lying on them had covered their eyes with pieces of white fabric, to protect themselves from the blindingly bright light of the lamps overhead. Olga soon understood that this was part of a refined method of torture by sleep deprivation. Interrogations always took place at night. Sleeping was ‘not allowed’ in the daytime when a dazzling light was shone onto the prisoners’ faces continuously. The effect of this sleep deprivation was that ‘the prisoners began to feel that time had come to a halt and their world had collapsed about them. They ceased to be sure of their innocence, of what they had confessed to, and which other persons they had compromised apart from themselves. In consequence they signed any raving nonsense put before them, and named the names needed by their tormentors to fulfil some fiendish plan for the liquidation of “enemies of the people”.’

  After the oppressive experience of solitary confinement, with no light, air or comradely spirit, the new cell seemed to have certain advantages. Luxuries, even. Olga was struck by the sight of a table, a teapot and a set of chess pieces. The other women clamoured around her, bombarding her with questions. Olga told them naively that she couldn’t imagine why she had been arrested, that it must be some mistake and that she would surely be released in a day or two when the authorities realised this. Unfortunately, her optimism was severely misguided as the long, monotonous days of waiting dragged on. Day after day passed and still she was not summoned for interview or interrogation. Almost unnervingly, it seemed as if nobody was in the least concerned with her.

  One of the cellmates, an odd woman with a waxen complexion called Lidochka, tried to reassure her, telling her: ‘You’ll certainly be released if they haven’t yet called you out for an interrogation after all this time. It must mean they have nothing on you.’ Olga was later to discover that not all inmates could be trusted. Lidochka was in fact a stool pigeon who worked for the prison authorities and whose job it was to report everything that the women said in the cell. (Olga learned much later that this same strange woman, who dreamed of earning a pardon by spying in the cell and who got cigarettes from the interrogators as a reward, was brutally killed in a labour camp by fellow prisoners. When they discovered her true loyalties, they ducked her head in a cesspool and held it there until she drowned.)

  Fortunately, there were other women who could be trusted in the cell. Olga quickly made a friend in an elderly fellow prisoner, Vera Sergeyevna Mezentseva. A former doctor in the Kremlin Hospital, she had been present at a New Year’s Eve party when a group of doctors had proposed a toast to the ‘immortal Stalin’. Another doctor remarked that the ‘immortal’ one was very ill, supposedly from cancer of the lip through smoking a pipe, and that his days were numbered. A third doctor then claimed that he had once treated Stalin’s double. After being denounced by an informer present at the gathering (in those days there tended to be one present at any gathering), the whole group of doctors had been thrown into the cells. Vera Sergeyevna, who had played no part in the conversation, faced a minimum of ten years in jail.

  Also among the cellmates to whom Olga became close was Trotsky’s twenty-six-year-old granddaughter, Alexandra. She had just finished her studies at the Institute of Geology. She had been arrested for copying out into her notebook some verses of an illicit poem supporting Jewry. One day, when Alexandra was called out of the cell ‘with belongings’, she clung to Olga, terrified. Afterwards, Olga was haunted by the sound of her wails as the guards pulled her away. They were later told that Alexandra had been sent off for five years ‘somewhere in the Far North’, with her mother, who was in the next cell. Mother and daughter were both considered ‘socially dangerous elements’.

  Olga later wrote: ‘Nowhere do you come closer to a person than in prison. Nobody listens and speaks to you like the cellmates who see their own fate reflected in your own, and from nobody else do you get such sympathy.’

  While Olga lived in perpetual fear, her heart quickening every time the cell door opened, Boris waited anxiously to hear news in Peredelkino. He felt increasingly isolated and alone without his soul mate. Tormented by Olga’s arrest, he fully expected to be taken into custody himself at any moment. And he knew that it was due to him that Olga had been arrested in the first place. This heightened his guilt that he had tried to break off relations with her earlier that year. On 9 August 1949, two months before Olga’s arrest, he had written to his cousin, Olga Freidenberg, of his conflicted feelings for his lover:

  I struggle with my need to talk out all my troubles to you because this thought can’t be executed. I’ve had a new big attachment, but as my life with Zina is real, I had to sacrifice the former sooner or later and, strange to say, while everything was full of torment, pangs of conscience, a broken heart, and even horrors, I could easily tolerate it and sometimes seemed happy. But now, I feel inconsolably despondent, my loneliness, my dangerous position at the edge of a literary criticism, the final purposelessness of my efforts as a writer, the strange duality of my fate ‘here’ and ‘there’ and so on and so forth.

  But once Olga was incarcerated, he pined for her, each day the familiar ache of longing becoming more intense. Less than a week after Olga’s arrest, he wrote to his friend Nina Tabidze of his despair:

  Life literally repeated the last scene of Faust – Marguerite in the Dungeon. My poor O. followed our dear Titsian. It happened a week ago on October 9th. Probably the rivalry of no man could seem so threatening and dangerous as to evoke jealousy in its most acute, sucking form. But I often, since my green days, had been jealous of a woman’s past, of her disease, the threat of death or departure, of the forces far away and insurmountable. Thus I am jealous now of the power and bondage and uncertainty instead of my touch and voice … Suffering will make my work deeper, including still sharper features in all my being and all my consciousness. But it’s no fault of hers, poor soul, is it?

  As he had predicted to Nina Tabidze, Boris’s writing did indeed become ‘deeper’. He channelled the anguish, guilt and pain caused by his separation from Olga into his prose. Like his hero Yury, who only develops his poetic and philosophical gifts as he is separated from his wife, children and his mistress, Lara, so Boris’s writing is heightened as he lives on the edge of a political and emotional abyss. Acute jealousy is a strong theme in Doctor Zhivago. He writes of his passionate love for Lara and the grisly side-effect of such intimacy: his tormented possessiveness. ‘I am jealous of your hairbrush, of the drops of sweat on your skin, of the germs in the air you breathe which could get into your blood and poison you,’ Yury says to Lara. ‘And in exactly the same way as though he were an infectious illness, I am jealous of Komarovsky who will take you away from me some day, just as certainly as death will some day separate us. I know this sounds like a lot of confused nonsense, but I can’t say it more clearly. I love you beyond mind or memory or measure.’

  As the weeks passed and Boris was left alone by the authorities, free to continue writing, he became increasingly convinced that he was not being arrested thanks to Olga’s valiant conduct in the Lubyanka. And he was right. A fortnight after her arrest, her interrogations finally began.

  Olga had just eaten her supper (potatoes and salted herring) and lain down on her cell bed to sleep, when the duty guard rushed in to demand: ‘What are your initials? Get dressed for interrogation!’

  Agitated, she put
on her dark-blue crepe de chine dress with large white polka dots, which her mother had handed in to the prison. It was Boris’s favourite dress. As she put it on, Olga felt a fantastical surge of expectation that she would shortly be released. She even envisaged walking home through the streets of Moscow, and Boris’s elation when he came to her apartment the following morning and found her there.

  The guards took her out of the cell and led her down long corridors, past closed, mysterious-looking doors from which echoed occasional terrifying cries and wails of distress. They stopped outside a door numbered 271. Olga was not led into a room but what looked like a cupboard. Suddenly, the cupboard ‘revolved’ and she found herself rotated into a large room with soldiers standing chatting. They fell silent as she passed by. She was ushered into a vast, smart, brightly lit office. Sitting behind a desk was a ‘handsome, portly figure with brown eyes, sleek, steeply-arching eyebrows, dressed in a long military tunic with small buttons up to the neck’.

  Olga was not yet to know that this was Viktor Abakumov, Stalin’s Minister of State Security, and one of the leader’s most violent henchmen. During the war Abakumov had led the military counter-intelligence unit, SMERSH, an acronym for ‘Death to Spies’, which set up blocking positions immediately behind the front lines and executed Red Army soldiers who attempted to retreat. The unit also hunted down deserters and brutally interrogated German prisoners of war. Before torturing his victims, it was said that Abakumov would unroll a bloodstained carpet to protect the sheen on his office floor.

  Abakumov motioned for Olga to sit down on a chair some way from him. On his desk was piled a haul of books and correspondence that had been taken from her apartment during the police raid, including one of her favourites, Pasternak’s Collected Prose Works, which a colleague had brought back for her from a trip abroad. The title page was covered by a dedication to her in Boris’s flowing hand, which to Olga ‘always looked like a flock of cranes sailing across the sky’. Boris had written: ‘To you as a memento – even if imperilled by all these pictures of my ugly mug.’ The first printed page of the book showed a sketch of Boris, aged seven, sitting writing at a table, one leg dangling from a chair, drawn by his father, Leonid. It was followed by the artist’s self-portrait, showing Leonid as a ‘handsome, grey-haired man in a soft-brimmed hat’.

  Olga could also see the small red volume of verse in which Boris had written those ‘blissful words’: ‘My life, my angel, I love you truly.’ Dated April 4th, 1947, it was, to Olga, ‘the year when our closeness had begun to seem to him like some stupendous victory or gift’.

  Among the stash on his desk there were other signed books of Boris’s verse and translations; her personal diary; bundles of letters (157 in total); various photographs of Olga; many books in English; and some of Olga’s own poems. She sat there in her chair, ready to meet her fate. Telling herself to cast all hopes aside, she thought to herself that she must await the end and not lose her dignity.

  ‘Tell me now, is Boris anti-Soviet, or not, do you think?’ Abakumov asked sternly. Before she could reply, he continued: ‘Why are you so bitter? You’ve been worrying about him for some reason! Admit it now – we know everything.’

  As Olga did not know the identity of her interrogator, she fearlessly responded with none of the caution that an encounter with a dangerous figure such as Abakumov would normally demand.

  ‘You always worry about a person you love,’ she replied. ‘If he goes out on the street, you worry in case a brick falls on his head. As regards whether Boris Leonidovich is anti-Soviet or not – there are too few colours on your palette – only black and white. There is a tragic lack of half-tones.’

  Abakumov arched his eyebrows and gestured to the pile of Olga’s confiscated books. ‘How did you come by these?’ he asked. ‘You no doubt realise why you are here at this moment?’

  ‘No, I don’t. I am not aware of having done anything.’

  ‘Then why did you plan to get out of the country? We know all about it.’

  Olga replied indignantly that she had never in all her life thought of leaving Russia.

  Abakumov brushed this aside, impatiently: ‘Now listen here, I would suggest that you think very carefully about this novel Pasternak is passing round to people at the moment – at a time when we have quite enough malcontents and enemies as it is. You are aware of the anti-Soviet nature of the novel?’

  Olga contradicted him ‘hotly’ and tried in a rather disjointed way to describe the contents of the part of the novel already completed.

  Abakumov cut her short: ‘You will have plenty of time to think about these questions and how to answer them. But personally, I would like you to appreciate that we know everything, and that your own as well as Pasternak’s fate will depend on how truthful you are. I hope that next time we meet, you will have nothing to conceal about Pasternak’s anti-Soviet views. They are clear enough from what he says himself.’

  ‘Take her away,’ he said imperiously, looking at the guard.

  As Olga was led back along the corridors to her cell, the Lubyanka clock showed that it was three in the morning.

  Olga spent fitful hours trying to sleep under the blinding lights. She began to understand the effect of the sleep deprivation as she was becoming confused in her mind and feeling exhausted. Just as she was allowed to go to bed and had covered her face with a handkerchief in a bid to shield her eyes from the powerful blaze of the lights, the door opened with a clang.

  Again she was led down a long corridor, this time to a simpler office occupied by a man in a military tunic whom she had not encountered before. He explained that he was Anatoli Sergeyevich Semionov (a junior official). He then explained that her interrogator the day before had been Minister Abakumov himself.

  Semionov urged Olga to confess that she and Pasternak had been planning to escape abroad and to declare Pasternak’s novel anti-Soviet. When Olga protested once more that she was not aware of having done anything wrong, Semionov smiled ironically: ‘Ah, but it will take six or eight months for us to establish whether you’ve done anything wrong or not.’ Olga felt herself go cold. This was the crossing of another boundary. ‘The door had slammed shut and there was no question of going home.’

  Semionov asked Olga about her family. ‘Talk to us about your father.’

  ‘As far as I know my mother left him in 1913. According to my Uncle Vladimir, he died from typhoid in 1914,’ Olga replied.

  ‘Please don’t make things up,’ Semionov demanded. ‘We know for sure that he joined forces with the Whites in 1918. And what about your mother, wasn’t she condemned of anti-Soviet activities?’

  ‘My mother has never been involved in anti-Soviet activities.’

  ‘Tell us how you met Pasternak?’

  ‘We met in October 1946 at Novy Mir, where I was working at the time.’

  ‘When did you become intimate?’

  ‘April 1947 …’

  Olga’s interrogation sessions with Semionov became a nightly ordeal. He was not particularly rough with her, and thankfully never physically violent. She appreciated this as she had learned from her cellmates that some of their interrogators became aggressive, slapping them across the face and verbally abusing them. Semionov spoke instead in a mocking tone, endlessly repeating the same stereotyped phrase about how ‘Pasternak sat down at a table with the British and Americans but ate Russian bacon.’ Olga found this phrase increasingly irritating, hearing it over and over again. In the end, Semionov declared that Pasternak was a British spy. The fact that he had family in England and had held several meetings with the British diplomat Isaiah Berlin was, for his inquisitors, evidence enough of his disloyalty.

  Semionov’s interrogations of Olga went on for weeks. The conversations were always along the same lines. ‘It became a matter of ordinary routine for me during my stay in the Lubyanka,’ she later recalled, ‘even in hell, it thus appeared, life could be quite humdrum.’ A classic interrogation followed these lines:

 
Semionov: Speak to us about Pasternak’s political opinions. What do you know about his undermining activities, his pro-Britain opinions and his betraying intentions?

  Olga: Pasternak does not belong to this category of people, he has no anti-Soviet views. He has no intention to betray his country. He has always loved his homeland.

  Semionov: So how do you explain that we found in your house a publication written in English dedicated to his work? How did you get hold of it?

  Olga: The truth is that Pasternak gave it to me. It is about his father, who was a painter and it was published in London.

  Semionov: How did Pasternak get it?

  Olga: Simonov [the editor of Novy Mir] brought it back from one of his trips abroad.

  Semionov: What more do you know of Pasternak’s ties with England?

  Olga: I think that he once got a parcel from his sisters who are living there.

  Semionov: How do you explain your relationship with Pasternak? He is, after all, a lot older than you?

  Olga: Love.

  Semionov: I don’t believe that. No, you were joined together by your shared political views and treasonous intentions.

  Olga: We did not have any such plans. What I loved about him and still love is the man he is.

  Semionov: After questioning witnesses, it was concluded that you have continually praised Pasternak’s work and that you have presented them as a contrast to work from patriotic writers such as Sourikov or Simonov, whereas the artistic methods of Pasternak in depicting Soviet reality are wrong.

  Olga: That is right, I have praised his work as a model to Soviet writers. His work is very precious for Soviet literature. His artistic methods are not wrong but just subjective.