by Robert Carr
Turning back to the letters he was holding, Laukhin told Ben he was particularly pleased about the connection with Tsvetayeva. The simple mention of a potential meeting between Babel and her, which, as far as he knew, never took place, was yet another reason for Ben to include Tsvetayeva in his thesis, and he made it clear that he expected Ben to fall into line. It didn’t matter to Laukhin whether the thesis focused on Babel or on Tsvetayeva. He understood that Ben preferred the former, but—he said, wagging his finger at him—with the Tsvetayeva material from his father’s journal being so extensive, she should certainly take up more room in the thesis. “The rest,” he concluded, “is a matter of how much academic weight you can give something that is pure conjecture.”
Ben protested. “The letter is not a conjecture. Nor the fact that Babel worked on a novel during his years of silence.”
“Yes, of course, but we don’t have the novel.”
Wednesday, 21 January, 1940
Last night we had Kolya Klyuchev for dinner—the first dinner with guests in our new apartment. Two days ago, before noon, Kolya and I dismantled the Volkovs’ dining room table, loaded it in a truck together with its six chairs, and moved it to Lavrushinsky Lane. The table is a bit too long. We’ll see. We’ll take the middle leaf out most days, and move two chairs against the wall. It was Pavliuk who found the truck, through his brother. The driver was very happy with the money I gave him, a young, cheerful lad just released from the army. He loved the elevator. He helped us put the table back together and afterward, as he left, asked, “What kind of a room is this, with no bed in it?”
Yevgenya said that their new dining table would be twice as big as the one they sold us—maybe more than twice. Ignoring Kolya, she steered me into a corner, pressed her body against mine, and said, “I hear your books are becoming a must read. Who’d have thought? The Iced Waterfall is on my night table right now. There must be more to you … But, you know, I always sensed that. Well, well, we must find out.” I said, “I could read to you from my book, Yevgenya, before you fall asleep.”
Since Kolya had helped with the new table and chairs, we thought we’d have him as our first dinner guest. Not that we had much choice, as cousin Kolya had been practically living in our place since his actress wife ran off the morning of the new year. A third and recent wife, he had not seen it coming. He wouldn’t say whether there was another man, or she had a swift change of mind. Often tearful, he told us he couldn’t bear to be in his empty apartment, and that he was grateful for our understanding. With Kolya lingering around many evenings, Varya would catch me in the kitchen and whisper, “Why is he still here?” I’d try to placate her, “Varenka, it’s for a while only …” “I dreamt all my life for some privacy, Pavlusha, just us, a bathroom to share only with my family. I finally get it and it comes with Kolya.” Most times, chased away by Varya’s words or hostile silence, Kolya would retreat to sleep in his own place, only a few metro stations away, but now and then he’d leave us only to climb upstairs to the Pasternaks.
Varya’s mother had sent us a black-market chicken, and Varya cooked a delicious stew with onions, peppers, potatoes and cauliflower. She put aside the neck, the back, and the wing tips for a soup later this week, and the gizzards for Tyomka. I bought fresh bread in the afternoon and Kolya brought two bottles of vodka. Quite a feast. Kolya also brought along his new girlfriend—she’s more than twenty years younger than he, a child—and he couldn’t keep his hands off her. He told us at the last moment he’d bring someone, and Varya commented, “Hallelujah, we might see less of him in the future.”
We told Kolya’s new friend about our luck with the apartment and our awkward meeting with Tsvetayeva. And it turned out that we talked about Tsvetayeva the entire evening—in truth, Kolya told stories and we listened. He was in very good form. The tears, the sighs and the bitter words for his treacherous wife were forgotten. The young woman was working miracles on him—that evening at least—and he entertained us with gossip about Tsvetayeva’s affairs before and during her marriage. And yet she had loved her husband, Kolya insisted. After all, she had followed him when he left Russia, and then, fifteen years later, followed him back here. Was he worthy of such devotion?
The lives some people have!
Three months after she returned to the Soviet Union, both her daughter and her husband were in jail. She has not heard a word about them since, and she has no idea if they’re still alive.
During the civil war, alone in Moscow with her two daughters and with nothing to eat, Tsvetayeva placed her younger daughter, Irina, in an orphanage, thinking that the child would have a better chance of surviving. Little Irina, not even three years old, died there of hunger.
The lives some people have!
It’s as if they constantly make the worst possible choices. And so the anguish goes on and on. Varya is right, Tsvetayeva is tragedy. Her end is near; it’s unavoidable, already decided by our modern gods. I can hear the choir chanting about the inevitable, praising the Party’s huge steamrollers that crush anybody different. I rarely have these kinds of premonitions, but I do about her. Is it because she seems so helpless, so impractical, so ineffective, so lost, so alone?
Toward the end of the evening, Kolya’s new girlfriend ran to the bathroom and threw up. As they staggered out of the apartment, Kolya was calling her Grushenka, Little Pear, and she was very pale and shivering.
After they left, Varya wondered how my cousin knew so much about Tsvetayeva. Or appeared to know. I told her he must have heard many stories about Tsvetayeva from Pasternak. Almost ten years older than me, Kolya had been a good friend of Boris Pasternak since their days together at Moscow University. Kolya had written poetry in his early days (and, he recently whispered to me between sobs, that he was writing again) and it was this common interest that led to their friendship. They remained good friends after Kolya gave up the idea of writing poetry as a permanent occupation and—to his parents’ delight—turned to medicine. I told Varya too that Kolya might have met Tsvetayeva before she left Russia. Pasternak and Tsvetayeva knew each other before she went abroad to join her husband, and they sporadically corresponded during the many years Tsvetayeva was away. They admired each other as poets, but—as he said during dinner—Kolya felt that there must have been more to it than that. It was hard to keep their friendship going through letters, though, even if they were both poets. They saw each other the one time Pasternak traveled briefly to Paris. Tsvetayeva may have expected more on her return, but Pasternak had married again and had his own life and worries.
What a luxury it is to have your own room, and to be able to write undisturbed!
I slept poorly last night. Too much booze, of course, but my mind was restless. I thought of Tsvetayeva, then of the Fredkins, and there I got stuck, couldn’t get them out of my mind. Kolya’s girlfriend, Little Pear, had said soon after she walked in last evening that she knew our apartment quite well, but then she clammed up. Later, much later, not long before she threw up, she said that she had been a good friend of the Fredkins’ oldest daughter.
Had been? I shouldn’t have shown my distress and astonishment, yet I did. Worse, it came out with a hint of blame.
Little Pear said she didn’t know where the daughter was. Maybe she had been taken away too, or had slipped quietly away somewhere—if that were possible—hoping to be forgotten.
“You didn’t ask around, didn’t ask anybody? I mean, other friends of hers?”
Little Pear looked pale and unsettled. “I did, for a few days, but then, you know …” She stammered and looked beseechingly at us. She had realized, or had been told, that it would be safer not to try to find out what had happened to her friend.
I felt terrible. What right had I, now living in the former Fredkins’ apartment, to ask her such questions.
It was then that Little Pear rushed to the bathroom and threw up. Kolya rushed after her, but not before he threw me a reproachful look. Varya stared after him and said, “Christ, he co
uld be her grandfather.”
Could it be that the Fredkins were entirely innocent? Well, of course they were, but could they have been so hideously unlucky that they were fingered simply because they lived in the apartment that the Kremlin master thought would do well for the author of the Oleg Vinograd stories? I could imagine it:
“Did, what’s his name, that writer of spy stories, Laukhin, yes, did Laukhin get an apartment?”
“Not yet, Comrade Stalin.”
“Make it happen. Immediately.”
“We don’t have anything available right now, Comrade Stalin. Unless, of course, we move a bit faster.”
A thoughtful puff of the pipe, followed by a weak exhalation of blue smoke. “Who do you have in mind?”
“I brought with me a list, just in case. Here it is.”
Fate, in the form of a tobacco-stained finger, moved down the paper slowly, methodically. “There, Fredkin. Never liked him much—I think.”
“Will do it. Tonight, Comrade Stalin, tonight.”
What if the apartment was the one freed up by the disappearance of Bedrosyan’s sister and brother-in-law? Would Bedrosyan have talked about the party’s gift to me with the same enthusiasm? Would he have asked somebody else to tell me, somebody less conflicted? It didn’t seem to affect him much. He talked about the Fredkins as if they are no longer in this city of ours. No longer even in our world. And he was right, they aren’t. What did Bedrosyan say? “It belonged to Fredkin. Well, it doesn’t matter now.” Did he say that on purpose or was it a slip-up? Probably on purpose, to let me know that I am not better than him, not better than all the others with their snouts deep in or waiting their turn. It’s not that I didn’t feel sorry for the Fredkins. I did, for a few seconds, after Bedrosyan mentioned their names. A few seconds, and then I succumbed to the thrill of being at the trough at long last.
5
Ben was outside Alumni Hall, checking the grey sky. Laukhin pointed his umbrella at him. “Is it going to rain?”
Ben shrugged.
“How far have you got with the trip?” He had asked Ben to do a first translation of the trip to Yelabuga for the Tsvetayeva bundle.
“I’ve translated the first entry,” Ben said. “Their routine on the boat, the cold weather and the brief forays on the deck, steward Arkhip, Captain Korotkov’s table. It’s still in rough shape.” He hastened to add, “And I typed in the excerpt about Tsvetayeva and her son staying for a few nights in your parents’ new apartment. Do you remember her at all?”
He shook his head. “I remember Georgy, her son. He seemed huge to me.”
“Such fear, stifled, smoldering, unable to find an outlet. Your mother must have been out of her wits. I’ve gone through it at least a dozen times by now, and it’s still gut-wrenching. It tugs at one’s heart, Artyom Pavlovich. That cousin of yours, Sasha Cornilov, he was a nasty piece. Did you know him well?”
Laukhin thought for a while. “You could say I didn’t know him at all. I was still a child when he stopped coming to our home. He and my father, as you’ve already discovered, didn’t exactly get along. Mother would sometimes see him at her sister’s place. She took me along a few times, but my father was not happy about it and so she stopped taking me with her. I completely lost touch with him. A poet too, ha. He was—maybe still is, he was very much alive when I left—like that fictional poet cop, Adam Dalgliesh, who caught murderers and wrote poetry in his spare time. Although Cornilov’s job wasn’t to catch murderers. He wrote most of his poetry—not that bad, I read some of it out of curiosity—in his youth. Perhaps he never stopped writing.”
“What exactly did he do?”
“He worked for the KGB, quite high up, but I never knew exactly what his title or role were. My father wanted nothing to do with him. I knew from my mother that his first wife died relatively young, leaving him with a twelve-year-old son, and that he was a good, devoted father. He remarried a younger woman, but only after his son left home.”
“For somebody who didn’t know him, whose family avoided him, you seem well informed about him.”
Laukhin smiled. “I knew his daughter.”
“How so?”
“She liked my poems.”
“A groupie, a poklonnitsa.”
“She wrote poetry too.”
“And you helped her.”
“Not much. It was just before I left the Soviet Union.”
“Ah, you did help her. How well did you know her?”
A few drops of rain fell on Laukhin. He looked up at the low clouds and said, “It’s starting.”
“You didn’t answer me. How well did you know her?”
“We had an affair. A brief one.”
“With Miss Cornilov? With your first cousin—well, once removed?”
“We weren’t related at all. She was Cornilov’s stepdaughter. His second wife, a widow, came with a daughter. Not Miss Cornilov, though, because she kept her father’s last name—Lyutov.”
“Lyutov? You’re making this up.”
“I’m not. Miss Lyutov, indeed.”
“How did you meet her? I thought you had no contact with Cornilov.”
“At a poetry reading several months before I left. She came and talked to me afterward. She told me we were related, kind of, and she smiled. It had the right effect on me. It was a hot summer evening, and I was tired and irritated with all the fawning words, and the small apartment was crowded and stuffy. Yes, I was also keen to know what had happened to my cousin. And Anna was young—a young beautiful woman, who tempted this older poet.”
“What happened?” Ben asked. “Tell me about it.”
“There isn’t much to tell. We had a banal—how should I describe it—romantic episode. The usual story: famous, middle-aged poet, youthful admirer. She was a ripe piece of fruit dangling from a low branch. An easy pick, like many others, and so I picked and tasted. It’s not that she didn’t know what she was getting into. She had her eyes wide open, despite her youth. It might even have led to a book of poetry—about a departed lover, about waiting and betrayal. I heard she’d published a slim volume of verses a few years after I left. I tried to get a copy—vanity, Ben, vanity—but couldn’t. Maybe it was just a silly rumour, nothing more. Who’d publish such drivel in the Soviet Union, anyway?”
* * *
Anna Lyutova. The first image that came to his mind was of her small, perfect breasts, a touch asymmetric and that made them all the more beguiling. It was the early afternoon, the second time they had made love, and a spot of sunlight was dancing on her cheek. She had straddled him, and he touched her breasts softly, hesitantly, as if he were blind—the diffidence of a lecherous older man not believing his luck.
“Hypocrite,” Anna laughed when he said he felt guilty to have her in his bed. “I’m twenty years old. Anyway, I was the one who seduced you, remember?”
“I’m too old for you—twenty-two years older.”
“So?”
“We have no future together.”
“No one has a future in this country of ours.”
“Still.”
“I don’t want a future with you. I want a now. I want to know what makes a poet.”
“You know that already. You are a poet yourself.”
Later he moved to an armchair to get a better view of her. He held, prudishly, a pillow on his lap, and began peppering her with questions about her family. She was guarded and somewhat puzzled about her stepfather, but talked about her mother, Natalya, with much irritation. She didn’t understand why her mother had married Sasha Cornilov. Well, perhaps she did, but for a long time she had refused to accept it.
“What did you think—what do you think—of your stepfather?” Laukhin asked.
It took her a while to answer. She’d been a typical, boring, exasperating teenager when her mother remarried. She didn’t think much in those days—she had boys and poetry on her mind. She appreciated the material comforts Cornilov brought them, but otherwise she kept her distance from
him. As he did from her. She was now thinking of moving to Leningrad and hoped he’d help her, because this way she’d be out of his hair and he could give free rein to his love for Natalya. A complicated man, undoubtedly, probably ruthless if provoked. But he’d been kind to her, protective, in a detached, wary way.
It struck Laukhin that she talked not like a twenty-year-old, but like somebody much older, or as if this was not her first lifetime. Had she asked, startled and distressed, “Dear God (Lord Vishnu?), why the Soviet Union this time?”
“Is he still a Chekist?” he asked.
“Yes.”
She thought her stepfather’s career had faltered as he approached retirement. Cornilov became soft, talked imprudently about trying to understand those who went astray, and was seen in a church crossing himself, tears in his eyes. Marrying Natalya Lyutova had been a bad decision, and a surprising one. Not only because his new bride was sixteen years younger than him, but also because her former husband had had skirmishes with the NKVD.
“How old were you when they got married?” Laukhin asked.
“Sixteen.”
Cornilov towered over her mother. They were an odd pair because of the difference in age and size, but he worshipped her. He looked at her and after her with the fervour and devotion of a dog, always trying to anticipate her smallest need or whim. His talk became peculiar, annoying to their friends. Whenever he’d say something he’d immediately turn to her and ask, “Isn’t that so? Isn’t that so, Natushka?” He wanted her approval for everything—his opinions, the books he read, the shoes he wore, even his choice of shoelaces. It was embarrassing to witness. “Am I right, Natushka?” or “Do you like it, Natushka? Tell me if you don’t, and I’ll …”
He began writing poetry again. His superiors frowned upon it—somebody who wrote poetry was not likely to posses the single-mindedness and concentration required by their work. He had not published anything in the fifties and the sixties, but later a few poems appeared in two literary magazines and a slim volume of selected verse was printed. Had his position opened doors to editors and publishers? Of course. But he was not a bad poet. His verses were dark—always had been—although, lately, this was less of an issue provided due balance and respect was paid to the regime.
