At last, the interminable working day would end and the prisoners crawled slowly home, raising the dust as they shuffled wearily by in lines. Olga remembered the wooden camp gates as usually being silhouetted by a dark red sunset. Far from a sign of beauty and hope, this merely threatened another blisteringly hot day to come. Women guards hurried out to frisk the prisoners, ensuring that they brought nothing inside. Every night, Olga lay awake wondering how she could escape work the following day. When she first arrived she was still plagued by stomach pains and haemorrhages after losing the baby. Her health and weakening state worsened in the heat, and she dreaded toiling in the fields.
One night, Olga finally decided that she would not go out the following day. She dreamed of being able to rest in the shade of the barracks. Summoning her most rebellious spirit, she put her Devil’s skin dress to soak in a basin of water next to her bunk. Her mother had sent her a dressing gown of pale blue, light-weight fabric. She yearned to put it on; to feel the soft respite of the cool material against her parched skin. But she had been forced to hand the dressing gown in to officials when a tightening of regulations led to the confiscation of all prisoners’ personal belongings.
As dawn broke, she lay in her slip, suddenly gripped with fear at what she had done. The roll call was going on outside and, her nerve wavering, she realised that she had nothing to put on, as her spare smock was being mended by the nuns. When her brigade was called out and Olga was not present, a triumphant Buinaya reported her. The guards stormed into Olga’s barracks, dragged her outside, bruising her arms they gripped her so tight, and threatening her with every conceivable punishment.
She had hastily wrung out her dress, and now stood in it, soaking wet and clinging to her body, in front of the entire prison camp. Instantly it was covered by a fine, grey dust, and then began to turn stiff in the morning sun. Olga was then forced to file past the camp officers on the steps of the guard house, humiliated by their mocking stares, as they waved through the brigades on the way to their day’s labour in the fields.
That evening, as Olga came to the perimeter gates at the end of another broiling day, she hardly had the strength to wait for the blissful words of command: ‘Stop work! Stand in formation!’ The tongues of the guards’ sheepdogs were hanging out, she noticed – for they too were spent with dehydration and heat exhaustion. Clouds of dust swirled in the air. ‘There was one more agonising procedure: the body search. You pressed forward eagerly to the hands waiting to feel you up and down – anything to get into the compound as fast as possible, splash water on your face, and collapse on your bunk, without bothering to go for the evening meal.’
Olga dropped down onto her mattress, too shattered to remove her ill-fitting shoes and dress. Her feet throbbed, her body pounded. She had only one wish: to sleep. All the prisoners prayed for sleep, to escape from the horrors of the day. And to dream of birds. This was considered a sign that you were to be released. Suddenly she felt a heavy hand on her shoulder. It was the security officer’s female orderly, sent to bring her to him. Olga felt the derisive gaze of the peasant women hot on her. Being called to an officer would mean that they would consider her a ‘squealer’. She left her bunk, studiously avoiding eye contact with her cellmates. Unlike in the Lubyanka, there was no camaraderie among the inmates, few friends to be made. If there was a potential kindred spirit, the women were always too tired to cross the compound and seek each other out. Instead each inmate retreated into her own personal hell.
Outside was a beautiful Mordovian night. The moon was low and large in the sky, while the air smelled fragrant as Olga walked past the incongruous, freshly watered flower beds that lined the barracks. From the outside, seeing the white-painted buildings and well-tended borders, you could not envisage the abominations inside. The suffocating stench, the groans of the wretched, lonely and sick crammed into filthy cells.
Olga was led to a cosy-looking house with a green-shaded lamp in the window. The warm domestic scene was, of course, misleading. This turned out to be the lair of the camp’s ‘Godfather’ – a security officer whose duty it was to organise surveillance of the prisoners and recruit informers among them. Olga could not have known as she walked inside what fate awaited her; was she to be interrogated, tormented or shot? Surely, her failed bid to avoid a day’s work in the fields would not escape severe punishment.
She was met by a thickset, corpulent man with boils erupting on his face. The last thing that she expected, panic thrumming, was to be handed a parcel. ‘Here is a letter for you, and a notebook. Some poems or other,’ the officer said, his tone surly. ‘It is not allowed for you to take them away. You must sit and read them here. Sign afterwards to say you’ve read them.’ He busied himself reading a file, while Olga sat down and opened the package. When she saw ‘Boria’s cranes’ flying over the pages, her lover’s free-flowing hand looping over, tears began to well in her eyes. He had written her a poem – about the miracle of their reunion:
When the snow covers over the roads
And lies heavily on the rooftops
I’ll go outside to take a walk
– And find you standing at the door …
Accompanying it was a twelve-page letter, and a little green notebook full of more poems.
… Trees and fences retreat,
Into the distant murk,
Alone among the snowdrifts,
You’re standing at the corner.
Olga devoured each precious word, ‘all those twelve pages full of love, longing, hopes and promises’, and her heart began to flood. All the fears she had harboured over the previous two years – Did he still love her? Would he fight for her? Stand by her? – melted away. ‘So he missed me, and loved me – just as I was now, in my smock with its convict’s number, my size 44 shoes, and my sun-scorched nose.’
In his letter Boris told her: ‘We are doing everything we can and will go on doing it. I am telling them that if we have done something wrong, then the guilt is mine, not yours. They should let you go and take me instead. I have some literary standing after all …’ She begged the camp guard to let her keep the letter and the poems. ‘There are no instructions to let you have them,’ he muttered in reply. ‘You must leave them here.’
As she read and reread the letter and poems into the early hours, under the guard’s watch, Olga was bolstered by the thought that the all-powerful Minister of State Security, Abakumov, must be making some kind of exception for her. Although there had been ‘no instructions’ to hand the letter and poems over to her, there had been orders to let her read them: to attest that she had seen them. Somebody was concerned with her case. Why else would she have to sign for them? Proof to someone – Boris? the Moscow authorities? – that she was still alive.
The first weak light of dawn pushed through as Olga walked back to the barracks. Instead of lying down, she obsessively studied her face in a small piece of tarnished mirror. Her eyes, she conceded, had not lost their cornflower-blue intensity, but her skin had coarsened and her nose had peeled too many times. One of her teeth had chipped at the side. It occurred to her as she scrutinised her face in the semi-light that her beloved Boris was writing to her as he had known her, over two years before. Vivacious and radiant. One more year in the labour camp and she worried that she would be unrecognisable to him; a decrepit, worn-out old woman.
She clung on to his words – ‘I write to you, my joy and wait for you …’ – repeating them endlessly on a loop in her head. It didn’t matter now that she would face another torturous day in the fields after a sleepless night. ‘Boria’s “cranes” had flown over Potma!’ Despite the withering stares she’d get from the Ukrainian women, who would now consider her an informer, she would sail through the day ahead. And she would pray to dream of soaring cranes that night.
Pasternak had, in fact, written many letters to Olga during the previous two years, but these had been confiscated by the camp authorities, as it was ‘not permitted to write to persons who are not close r
elatives’. As soon as Boris realised he began to send postcards masquerading as Olga’s mother.
After Olga received the package that unexpected night in the labour camp, she began receiving the postcards. Olga was charmed by their humour and passion. She found them ‘very funny; it was hard to imagine someone like my mother ever writing things which were so poetic and involved’. All of them were sent from Potapov Street and carried her mother’s signature at the bottom: Maria Nikolayevna Kostko.
‘The small republic of Mordovia came into our life never to leave it again with all the postal correspondence that came with it,’ remembered Irina. ‘Pasternak also sent letters to this “happy” land, actually postcards, and driven by a sweet conspiratorial spirit, he was signing them with my grandmother’s name … Did he really think he was fooling them? Who would have been stupid enough to think that our grandma with her serious and reasonable nature could write on postcards such fanciful and fantastic poems as well as those inspired remarks that would leave them both feeling exaltation and dereliction?’
On 31 May 1951, Boris penned the following postcard:
My dear Olia, my joy! You are quite right to be cross at us. Our letters to you should pour straight from the heart in floods of tenderness and sorrow. But it is not always possible to give way to this most natural impulse. Everything must be tempered with caution and concern. B.[oris] saw you in a dream the other day dressed in something long and white. He kept getting into all kinds of awkward situations, but every time you appeared at his right side, light-hearted and encouraging. He has decided it must mean he is going to get better – his neck is still giving him trouble. He sent you a long letter and some poems, and I sent you a few books. But it has all gone astray, it seems. God be with you, my darling. It is all like a dream. I kiss you endless times,
Your Mama.
And on 7 July:
My darling! Yesterday, the 6th, I wrote you a postcard, but it dropped out of my pocket somewhere on the street. I am going to play a guessing game; if it does not get lost, but reaches you by some miracle, then it means you will soon come back and all will be well. I wrote you in that postcard that I will never understand BL and am against your friendship with him. He says that if he were to speak his mind, he would say that you are the most supreme expression of his own being he could ever dream of. The whole of his past life, the whole of his future no longer exist for him. He lives in a fantastic world which he says consists entirely of you – yet he imagines this need not mean any upheaval in his family life – or in anything else. Then what does he think it means? I hug you, my purest dear, my pride, I long for you,
Your Mama.
Back in Peredelkino, Boris was consumed with writing the latter part of Doctor Zhivago which he conceived of as a monument to Olga: his Lara. The scenes of Lara’s departure and their separation at the end of the book directly reflect Boris’s heartbreak. He had already written the poem ‘Parting’, which appears as one of Yury Zhivago’s poems at the end of the book, and which Pasternak wrote immediately after Olga’s arrest:
From the threshold a man looks in
He cannot recognise his house.
Her departure was like a flight
And everywhere are signs of havoc.
All the rooms are in chaos;
Tears and an aching head
Prevent him from seeing
The measure of his ruin.
Since morning there has been a roaring in his ears.
Is he awake or dreaming?
Why does the thought of the sea
Keep pushing into his mind?
When the great wide world
Is hidden by the frost on the window,
The hopelessness of sorrow
Is even more like the desert of the sea.
She was as near and dear to him
In every feature
As the shores are close to the sea
In every breaker.
As after a storm
The surf floods over the reeds,
So in his heart
Her image is submerged.
In the years of trial,
When life was inconceivable,
From the bottom of the sea the tide of destiny
Washed her up to him.
The obstacles were countless,
But she was carried by the tide
Narrowly past the hazards
To the shore.
Now she has gone away;
Unwillingly perhaps.
This parting will eat them up,
Misery will gnaw them, bones and all.
He looks around him.
At the moment of leaving
She turned everything upside down,
Flung everything out of the chest of drawers.
Till dusk he roams about
Putting back into the drawers
The scattered scraps of stuff,
The patterns used for cutting out,
And pricking himself on a needle
Still stuck in a piece of sewing,
Suddenly he sees her
And cries quietly.
Alone in his study, Boris retreated into an unhappy solitude. His insomnia, which plagued him intermittently all his life, was worsening; while increasingly he felt the isolation and ambivalence of his place in literature. Without Olga he had lost his greatest champion and supporter. She played a decisive part in his writing life, not just in providing the creative fuel for the love affair central to the plot, but as she was a generation younger than Boris, she helped to give the novel a more contemporary – more ‘Soviet’ – flavour. In the novel, he writes of his anguish at his separation from Olga/Lara:
So dark and sad was it in Yury’s heart that, although it was early in the afternoon and full daylight, he felt as if he were standing late at night in some dark forest of his life, and the new moon, shining almost at eye level, was an omen of separation and an image of solitude.
He was so tired that he could hardly stand. He threw the logs out of the doorway on to the sledge in smaller armfuls than usual; the touch of the icy wood sticky with snow hurt him through his gloves. The work did not make him feel any warmer. Something within him had broken and come to a standstill. He cursed his luckless fate and prayed for Lara, that God might spare the life of the lovely, sad, humble and simple-hearted woman he loved. And the new moon stood over the barn blazing without warmth and shining without giving light.
The strain Pasternak was under personally and professionally was having a dangerous impact. Irina recalled an incident in 1950: ‘A few months later we were hit by another blow. Grandmother climbed the stairs to our apartment four steps at a time to tell us that it was all over: Pasternak had suffered a heart attack.’
Boris’s heart problems had first flared after Olga’s arrest and his visit to the Lubyanka. Although he was a relatively robust and fit sixty-year-old, the heart attack, which had been caused by a thrombosis, was a warning. Typical Boris, he expressed his anxieties about his health in his novel, giving Yury Zhivago similar cardiac problems: ‘It’s the disease of our time. I think its causes are of a moral order,’ he wrote. ‘A constant, systematic dissembling is required of the vast majority of us. It’s impossible, without its affecting your health, to show yourself day after day contrary to what you feel, to lay yourself out for what you don’t love, to rejoice over what brings you misfortune … Our soul takes up room in space and sits inside us like the teeth in our mouth. It cannot be endlessly violated with impunity.’
Boris recovered, aided by Zinaida’s attentive ministrations at Peredelkino. For the next two years he continued to work on the novel, and his Faust translations, as none of his original works were published. He was desperate to finish Faust in order to turn back to Zhivago – ‘a completely unselfish and unprofitable undertaking, since the novel is not destined for publication under current conditions’. What is more, he wrote, ‘I am not writing it as a work of art, although it is a fiction in a larger sense than my earlier th
ings were. But I do not know whether there is any art left in the world and what meaning that might have. There are people who love me very much (there are very few of them), and my heart is in debt to them. For them I write this novel, I’m writing it as a long letter to them, in two books.’
The scenes of Yury’s heartache for Lara reflect the unbearable nature of Boris’s longing for Olga: ‘Something other than himself wept and complained in him and shone with gentle words in his darkness. His soul sorrowed for him and he too grieved for himself …’ On the spiritual union of their love, he wrote: ‘You and I, it’s as though we had been taught to love in heaven and sent down to earth together to see if we had learned what we were taught. What we have together is a supreme harmony – no limits, no degrees, everything is of equal value, everything gives joy, everything has become spirit. But in this wild tenderness which lies in wait for us at every moment there is something childishly untamed, forbidden. It’s a destructive wilfulness hostile to domestic peace. It’s my duty to be afraid of it and to distrust it.’
In October 1952, after Olga had endured the worst summer of her life in the labour camp, Boris suffered a second, far more serious heart attack. He had spent the previous months plagued by toothache and boils on his gums. A heart condition was confirmed when he fainted coming home from the dentist. He was rushed to Moscow’s Botkin Hospital, where the head ward doctor, Professor B. E. Votchal, was seriously concerned about Pasternak’s chances of survival. Boris spent his first night, as he described it, ‘with a miscellany of mortals at death’s door’. The rest of the week he was lodged in a common ward because the hospital was overcrowded. When he improved a little, Zinaida agitated to have him transferred to the Kremlin Hospital, where the renowned Jewish professor, one of Moscow’s finest cardiologists, Miron Vovsi was in charge. (Months later, after Pasternak’s discharge from the hospital, Vovsi, who had been the head doctor with the Red Army during the war, was arrested as an alleged member of the Zionist terrorist group known as the ‘doctor-wreckers’.)
Lara Page 15
