by Robert Carr
“I gather the father didn’t stick around.”
“He didn’t. But it wasn’t because he was a bad sort. No. It was Martha who told him to disappear. He got on her nerves.”
“What does she say?”
“Martha?”
“She’d know whether or not she was married.”
“I asked her once. She laughed. She said, ‘Whatever makes a better story.’”
“You English are shocking. All this makes my Moscovite parents seem eminently virtuous. Although I think my father had affairs. One passion in particular consumed him for years.”
“Reciprocated?”
“To some extent.”
“What does that mean?”
“Her affections were shared.”
“What happened?”
“She was shot after the war. Her husband too.”
“Good God. That wasn’t what I meant. Why were they shot?”
He sighed. Why—as if there was always a reason. How did one explain the unexplainable? “I don’t know. They fell out of favour. It was a murky period—people disappeared and were shot without much reason.”
She hesitated, as if searching for the right words, and then said, staring straight at him, “I hear you had affairs too. Many affairs. Runs in the family, it seems.”
That came out of nowhere, a blindside blow that stunned him. Well, it had been all over the press at the time he defected, and she was bound to learn about it sooner or later.
“Not that many,” he said.
“You left your wife in Moscow. And when you arrived in Toronto a few months later, there was a young woman with you.”
“Did Lezzard tell you this?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Lezzard is a fool. My wife and I had our problems. It was a bit more complicated than it appears.”
“Was it?”
“She divorced me, you know. Tanya, my former wife, filed for divorce two months after I left.”
“She likely learned you wouldn’t return.”
She was still looking at him intensely, as if trying to read his rotten soul. He laughed. “I didn’t say I was virtuous—I said my parents were.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s not my business.”
* * *
It was a pleasant May with hardly any rain. Thinking of Audrey and waiting up the street for Lezzard to leave the gallery made Laukhin feel young again. The euphoria of anxious expectations. He recalled the days he’d fallen in love with Tanya, long ago, also during a warm spring. On Tuesday and Friday evenings he’d take the red line to the Kamovniky district, get off at Frunzenskaya, walk through the park to the Sechenov Medical Institute, and wait across the street from the side exit until Tanya came out. They had developed a game or ritual of it, because he had once told her that he didn’t mind at all—quite the contrary—watching her chat with her colleagues and friends and waiting for her to say goodbye to them. When she left the building, she’d look across the street for him, smile happily and then talk with her friends for ten or fifteen minutes. His sister, Larissa, would often be with her—Tanya was her colleague, and it was through Larissa that he’d met her—and often, when there were only the two of them, they’d carry on with the ritual, and they’d point at him and laugh in a pantomime of exaggerated gestures and noises.
He knew he was ridiculous, absurd, just as fifty years were waving encouragingly at him. Mockingly too. He heard himself whispering Pushkin:
It ill-becomes me; I get older...
Time, time to be more sensible!
He had vowed to visit the gallery no more than once a week, but he rarely kept to it. He’d wait for Lezzard to leave, and if that didn’t happen he’d walk back to Alumni Hall. Once, after a couple of days when Lezzard didn’t leave for lunch at his usual hour, Laukhin walked in. A middle-aged woman in a dark green turtleneck was sitting at Audrey’s desk and showing Lezzard something in a large, thick book. Laukhin had met her before in the gallery, and he vaguely remembered a French first name. He asked where Audrey was. Was she sick?
Lezzard laughed. “She’s in London. Went to talk to her husband.”
“I thought they were separated.”
The woman looked at him with amusement. A huge triangular pendant pointed to the rise of very generous breasts.
“When will she be back?” Laukhin asked.
Lezzard laughed again. “That’s the thing about Audrey and her trips. It’s hard to know. Spontaneous departures, surprise returns. Part of her charm.”
After he left the gallery Laukhin remembered that the woman’s name was Mrs. Grunwald, Josiane Grunwald. She’d worked for Lezzard for many years. He knew from Audrey she’d been ill with some mysterious malady and was slowly recovering. “It’s something tropical,” Audrey had explained. “She went to Kenya on a safari. Time seems to be the best treatment, but she’s had relapses, many of them. There are days when she can’t get out of bed.” The Osterhoudts—Martha and her husband—had bought many paintings from Lezzard, and when Martha asked him if he could temporarily employ her daughter he couldn’t refuse. It turned out to be fortuitous too, because of Josiane’s shaky health.
* * *
Nicholas Millay, Audrey’s husband, was a bureaucrat at the Foreign Office. He began his career under his future father-in-law, and that’s how he met Audrey. Her father had been an economist who had been assigned to the Foreign Office during the war and never left it until he retired. Although there was a real earl in his family—a great-uncle on his father’s side—he had no money, and that was one of the reasons beautiful Martha, Audrey’s mother, had left Gerald and Audrey. It happened when Audrey was quite young, five or six years old. In her fifties now, Martha was still striking. Her latest husband was a Dutch-Canadian who had made a fortune in drugstores. He moved with Martha—often without her—from house to house, and from continent to continent.
Laukhin learned all this from Lezzard the day he asked about Audrey’s whereabouts. When he left, Lezzard followed him to the door and went down a few steps with him. “Audrey’s life is there, in London, together with her father whom she adores, and all her friends, and she had—has—many. She flies back whenever she can, almost every week. If you ask me, I don’t know why she’s still here. She’ll patch up with her husband, I’m sure. I have no idea what went wrong there, she won’t say. All I got is that it took a while for it to become a crisis, or for her to make up her mind and cross the ocean. Her husband desperately wants her back. All right, you’re a poet, a famous poet, and your education provides you with a veneer of social polish. Barely. But it’s the money, Art, or power. The means. That’s what attracts women in the West. They don’t go weak near a poet, like in the old country. A poet has no weight here. What are you offering her? A few bons mots from your literary friends before they get drunk and bemoan their poverty and how the world ignores them?”
He seemed to delight in describing the chasm between Laukhin and Audrey. Irritated, Laukhin asked about the promised letters. Lezzard said that he’d had no time to look for them. He grabbed Laukhin’s elbow. “Get me a copy of your father’s notebooks. It’s the one incentive that’ll make me keen to look again through the trunk of papers Mother left me.”
“Can’t do it.”
“Can’t or won’t? I thought we were friends.”
“Jean, friends get that no is an answer too.”
“What’s the big deal? Where is the crime? What could happen if an old man reads your father’s journal ahead of the other readers? Who would know, anyway?”
“We’ve been through this many times. The notebooks are not readable.”
“Surely you have most of them transcribed by now.”
“I told you I may have an advance copy of the first volume for you at the end of the summer.”
“But you have the galleys by now, so close to publication, don’t you?”
“I do.”
“When does it end?”
“The first volume?
The end of 1940.”
“Let me have a copy of the galleys.”
Laukhin sighed. “All right, but only the half I’ve gone through already. I had to stop in the middle in order to do something else, and it’s taking me much longer than I expected. I’ll make a copy of it and send it to you.”
“If you’d spend less time in this gallery …” Lezzard mumbled. “How far does it go, the available half.”
“The end of 1938.”
Lezzard swore.
“That’s the best I can do, Jean.”
* * *
“Stop. Why are you telling me this?”
“You asked me why I’d fallen behind.”
“I don’t want to know about your heartaches, Ben.”
“It’s the reason why, Artyom Pavlovich.”
“Nothing else?”
“Nothing else.”
He didn’t understand his students. He was fond of them, but they were a mystery to him. He’d never have attempted such a confession to any of his professors. It wasn’t just the cultural and political difference, it was generational too. He was almost twice their age.
He sighed. “All right, tell me.”
“Her name is Marion, and she’s—”
“No, no, I don’t need details.”
“How else can I explain?”
Should he slap Ben, or take him out for a drink? Duty upended by pangs of love. Christ.
He gestured Ben to carry on, hoping that his face showed both his perplexity and displeasure. He’d have to put up with it, since Ben had been his main help for the first volume and was now for the Tsvetayeva bundle.
* * *
Audrey talked at length about her parents after she got back from one of her many trips to London. She was worried about her father’s health. She was sitting at her small desk, addressing invitations to the opening of the gallery’s next show. A boring and mindless task, she said, and asked Laukhin to keep her company. Watching her profile as she wrote, he experienced, as he did when he first confessed his love for her, a perplexing anguish. He recalled the lines of the love-mad Moor, “… so lovely fair and smell’st so sweet, That the sense aches at thee.” His senses, visual and olfactory, ached for Audrey. Her lips were silently shaping the names of the invitees. He longed for a similarly mute but clear signal: come and hold me, come and kiss these lips. But nothing. Only silent invitations to Mr. and Mrs. David Mortimer, Mrs. Lieberman, Ms. Rockwell. The folly of his love became more apparent with each silent summons. Dr. Ruart, Mr. Wells, Mr. and Mrs. Benjamin Elkin.
After his lunch, Lezzard came in noisily, parked himself at his desk, released a discreet belch, and asked Audrey whether she could concentrate with the professor inanely twaddling in the background.
“It’s the belching that disturbs Audrey,” Laukhin said.
Lezzard got up and stepped out of the small room, clearly irritated.
“How old was your father when he died?” Audrey asked after a few more invitations.
“Sixty-one.”
“Very young.”
Lezzard shouted from the other room, “I need those invitations sent today.”
Audrey made a face, and Laukhin said, without moving, “I should go.”
“I’m worried about my father,” Audrey said. “He’s seventy and he has a weak heart.”
He wasn’t sure what she wanted to say.
“Of course, I knew about his condition,” she went on, “but I didn’t realize how bad it was until I went back to my old home after I left Nicholas. My father has trouble breathing and his legs are swollen. A nurse comes once a week to check on him, and a woman is there two other days to do the housekeeping and keep an eye on him. She’s fine, but she gets on his nerves. He looks forward to weekends simply because he’ll be alone.” She smiled. “He has all the time in the world for me. For me and my foolishness. He and Martha never hit it off.”
“Have you always called her Martha? I’ve never heard you say my mother.”
“I stopped calling her Mother when I was five years old. I had waited, with an increasingly irate Mrs. Bloom circling around me that Saturday, at the end of what turned out to be my last drawing lesson, the other pupils having long gone home with their parents. My father finally answered the last of Mrs. Bloom’s desperate ringing attempts, and rushed over to get me. He was flustered and was apologizing profusely when Martha arrived, only a minute or two later. She’d been two hours late, an eternity for a child. It was then that I, all of five years old, addressed my mother for the first time by her name. I asked, angrily, ‘Where have you been, Martha?’ She’s been Martha to me ever since.”
“You’re not fond of her, I gather,” Laukhin said.
“Martha is smart, determined, and glamorous. Witty too—yes, she is. She’s fifty-seven years old, and she can still turn heads. I look dull in her presence.”
Nonsense.
“She’s a very rich woman now. The MacNeil and, especially, the Osterhoudt marriages have seen to it. When she was forty-three and still beautiful, Martha married Diederik Osterhoudt, who everyone calls Dirk. He’s nineteen years her senior. This time she did exceedingly well financially, and she settled down. I mean, she didn’t divorce again and remarry. To her credit, she’s been very generous with her new money—Dirk’s money. She likes to give. I can ask anything of her, as long as it can be purchased. It’s her apartment that I’m in right now. It’s usually empty.”
Monday, 11 December, 1939
I went to the Writers’ Union this morning. Word reached me that I’d done something wrong on my application form for the Volinsky Retreat and that I should drop in and fix it. The fat boss of Progress Publishing was just leaving as I arrived, and he had good news. The Iced Waterfall had been selling well, much better than my first book, and they were talking about another printing, quite a large one. He seemed to be dancing around me. I was delighted by the news, of course, but also surprised to hear about the hefty reprint, given the shortage of paper. As I looked at him manoeuvring his large body into the waiting car, I wondered what bureaucratic bungle had caused my good fortune. I soon learned that it was no mistake.
But I went to the Writers’ Union mainly for drink and palaver. I had both, and a good laugh, with Shnaideman and Pavliuk. Shnaideman, officially divorced now, is still living with his wife in the same room, which has led to some embarrassing situations. He’s a good mimic, and his stories were side-splitting. He laughs loudly at his own jokes, and his huge torso sways like a mountain of gelatin. Shnaideman’s brother was supposed to have been transferred to Gorky, and Shnaideman was counting on getting his room when he decided to leave his wife. But his brother is not moving to Gorky anymore, hence the mess he is in.
Bedrosyan saw me as I was leaving and asked me to step into his office. “You must, Pavel Nikolayevich,” he added. “It’s important. Good news, don’t worry, very good news.”
I assumed it was the “good news” I just heard from the boss of Progress Publishing, but I followed him. His office smelled of un-emptied ashtrays and fear. Bedrosyan’s face, unshaven for a few days, had the colour of the ash that was always perched on the tip of his cigarette. A couple of months ago his brother-in-law was taken away and then, two weeks later, the wife, Bedrosyan’s sister, disappeared. A blessing that they had no children. Bedrosyan was afraid that they would come for him and his family too. Or that he’d lose his sinecure.
He was smoking, of course. Whiff of an early drink? His long face was wrinkled by a forced smile, his teeth as bad as ever. He patted me on the shoulder and we shook hands as he let me in. “Good to see you, Pavel Nikolayevich,” he said.
What caused this sudden pleasure at my presence, this unexpected surge of affection? I had no weight that warranted more than an indifferent nod.
He offered me a cigarette. “Yes, good news,” he went on, “excellent ones, in fact. It warms one’s heart to be the bearer of such news.”
It was indeed way beyond good news. We got the apartmen
t! The union had allocated a four-room apartment to us, in the writers’ building on Lavrushinsky Lane, the one across from Tretiakov Gallery. A prestigious building and location. An apartment of our own, with four rooms! One room would be my study. A room of my own!
We applied for an apartment when Tyomka was born, and we renewed the application when Varya got pregnant again, but in my mind we had at least two more years to wait and even then it would be a matter of luck, and of finding or buying some favour.
“It wasn’t easy,” Bedrosyan said, shaking his head and alluding to his efforts on my behalf. “Such scarcity, Pavel Nikolayevich, but you fully deserve it, especially now, as the family is growing, and you need privacy to write your wonderful books. How is the new novel coming? People are eagerly awaiting it, important people.”
I didn’t know what he meant at first, and was too jubilant to take in the grave inflexion in his tone. He took two glasses out of a drawer and a bottle of vodka. We clinked and drank; I could have kissed his ashen cheeks.
“When? When can we move in?” I asked.
“Give us a couple of weeks, the papers, you know. It’s like new, almost new. Four rooms—two of them quite large. A bathroom, of course, and a spacious kitchen. I went to have a look at it myself. The apartment has been empty for a couple of months.” He lowered his voice. “It belonged to Fredkin … Well, it doesn’t matter now.”
The name Fredkin was somewhat familiar—a theater director or a critic. Both? Pavliuk told me about him in a whisper, several weeks ago, at the Volkovs. They came to take Fredkin away—but that was not the core of Pavliuk’s story. While they searched the premises, Fredkin snuck into the bathroom and cut his wrists. When he didn’t come out, they broke down the door and found him, alive, of course, and as they bandaged him, they pummelled his face for trying to kill himself. How did he dare? How were they going to explain his wounds? They’d have to admit that they’d left the prisoner alone for a while. Were these the thanks they deserved for being nice to him? Fredkin’s wife fainted, the children, young twins—he had an older daughter too, but she was away—were woken by the noise and began screaming. They came back for his wife a week later. Aware that she might be detained as well, she took the children to her sister in Kiev. They were waiting for her when she returned.
