He understood perfectly!
From that moment on, they were friends.
Chapter 44
Out in the Open
TO THE MAKARYGIN FAMILY Nara and her Innokenty had been far-off, disembodied relatives until a year ago. They had flitted through Moscow for one short week in a year and sent presents at holiday times. Klara, who had got used to calling Galakhov, her famous older brother-in-law, Kolya, was still shy and tongue-tied with Innokenty.
But last summer they had stayed longer, and Nara was often at her parents’ apartment, usually complaining about her husband and the shadow over their marriage, which until recently had been so happy. She and Alevtina Nikanorovna discussed it at length, and if she happened to be at home, Klara listened, openly or surreptitiously. She could not have refrained even if she had wanted to. This was, after all, life’s greatest mystery: What made people love each other or not love each other?
Her sister told them about all sorts of trivial incidents, disagreements, quarrels, suspicions, and also about Innokenty’s professional misjudgments; he had changed so much, he showed no respect for the opinions of important people, and this affected their material position so that Nara had to go without things. As she told it, Nara was always right, her husband always wrong. Klara, privately, drew quite different conclusions. Nara did not know how lucky she was. She probably no longer loved Innokenty but only herself. What she cared about was not his work but the status it gave her, not his views and preferences, however they might have changed, but her possession of him, asserted for all to see. Klara was surprised to find that her sister resented her husband’s suspected infidelities less than his failure to emphasize sufficiently in the presence of other women that she alone was supremely important to him.
The unmarried younger sister could not help comparing her own situation with Nara’s and telling herself that, come what may, she would have behaved differently. How could Nara be satisfied with anything that left him unhappy? Their problem was aggravated by their childlessness.
Once Klara had opened her heart on the stairway, they were on such easy terms that she urgently needed to see more of him. She had such a backlog of questions that Innokenty was just the man to answer!
But the presence of Nara or any other member of the family would somehow make it awkward.
So when Innokenty suggested, shortly afterward, a day out in the country, her heart missed a beat and she agreed without thinking.
“No manor houses, museums, or famous ruins, though,” Innokenty said with a faint smile.
“I don’t like them either” was Klara’s firm response.
Now that she knew some of his troubles, his halfhearted smile caused a twinge of sympathy.
“Switzerland and places like that can drive a man crazy,” he said. “Wandering around ordinary Russian countryside is good enough for me. Think we can find any?”
Klara nodded vigorously. “We can if we try!”
It was left unclear whether this was to be an outing for two or for three. But Innokenty arranged to meet her on a weekday at the Kiev Station. He did not phone his home and would not call for Klara at Kaluga Gate, which made it obvious that there would be just the two of them and that Klara’s parents were probably not supposed to know.
As far as her sister was concerned, Klara felt quite entitled to this outing. Even if his marriage had been perfect, Innokenty would have been just paying his family dues. As things were, Nara had only herself to blame.
Would there ever again be such a wonderful day in Klara’s life? There would certainly be none for which preparations were so agonizing. What should she wear? If her women friends could be believed, no color suited her, but she had to choose one of them! She put on a brown dress and carried a blue coat. Her veil gave her more trouble than anything; the night before, she spent two hours trying it on, taking it off, trying it on again. Some lucky people can make their minds up at once! Klara was crazy about veils; especially in films, they made a woman enigmatic, raised her beyond the reach of critical scrutiny. Still, she decided against it. Innokenty had grown tired of French frippery, and, besides, it was going to be a sunny day. She did put on her black net gloves, though. Black net gloves were very pretty.
The Maloyaroslav train was waiting when they arrived. A small steam locomotive, it was splendid. They had no particular station in mind. They simply took tickets to the end of the line. The route was so new to them that they were both startled when fellow passengers mentioned a station called “Nara.” If Innokenty had known about it, he might perhaps have chosen a different terminus. If Klara had ever known, she had completely forgotten.
“Nara, Nara, Nara. . . .” They heard the name over and over again in the course of the journey. It seemed to haunt them.
It was a cool morning for August. They were both cheerful and animated, and they were soon chatting freely about anything and everything. Occasional lapses into formality ended in laughter and made them feel even more at ease.
Innokenty was wearing some sort of Western sports outfit, unconcernedly creasing and rumpling what he evidently thought of as “casual clothes.”
They had the whole day ahead of them, but Klara began eagerly interrogating him, switching erratically from questions about Europe to problematic aspects of Soviet life. She wasn’t quite sure herself what she wanted to know! But she knew there was something! She longed to be cleverer! She had to get to the bottom of it!
Innokenty wagged his head comically.
“Do you really think . . . little Klara . . . that I understand any of it myself?”
“But you diplomats are there to show the rest of us the way, and now you tell me you don’t understand.”
“Ah, but all my colleagues do understand; it’s only I who don’t. And even I understood it all till some time last year or the year before last.”
“Then what happened?”
“Do you know, that’s another thing I don’t understand,” Innokenty said laughingly. “And anyway, my little Klara, who knows where the explanation should start? It goes back to the very beginning of things. Suppose a caveman suddenly popped out from under the seat here and asked us to explain in not more than five minutes how trains can run on electricity. What would we tell him? First of all, off you go and learn to read. Then get on with your arithmetic, algebra, draftsmanship, electrotechnology. . . . Have I forgotten anything?”
“I don’t know . . . magnetics, perhaps?”
“There you are, you don’t know either. And you’re in your final year! Then I would say, ‘Come back in fifteen years’ time, and I’ll explain it in five minutes, only by then you’ll know it all yourself.’ ”
“Very well, I’m willing to learn. But how do I go about it? Where do I begin?”
“Well, our newspapers will do for a start.”
A man with a leather satchel was passing through the train selling newspapers. Innokenty bought Pravda from him.
Klara had realized when they boarded the train that they would be having a rather special conversation, and she had sent Innokenty ahead to occupy an uncomfortable double seat by a door. Innokenty hadn’t understood, but only there could they talk more or less freely.
“All right, now for our reading lesson,” he said, unfolding the paper. “Take this headline: ‘Women Filled with Labor Enthusiasm Overfulfill Norms.’ Ask yourself why they have to think about norms at all. Don’t they have anything to do at home? What it means is that the combined wages of husband and wife aren’t enough to support a family. Whereas the husband’s wage alone ought to be enough.”
“Is it enough in France?”
“And everywhere else. Look, here’s another bit: ‘In all the capitalist countries together there are fewer day nurseries than in our country.’ True? Probably. But one little detail is left out: In all other countries women are freer to bring up their children themselves, so they don’t need all these nurseries.”
The train shuddered. They were moving.
Inn
okenty found another text without difficulty, pointed to it, and spoke into her ear through the racket.
“Now take any apparently insignificant form of words: ‘Member of the French parliament so-and-so made a statement’ . . . about the hatred of the French people for the Americans. Did he, you ask? He probably did; we only print the truth! But something is left out. What party does he belong to? If he were not a Communist, they would certainly say so because it would make his utterance all the more valuable! So he is a Communist. But they don’t say so! And that’s the way it always is, Clairette. They’ll write about record snowfall somewhere, with thousands of cars buried in drifts—a national disaster! But the artful implication is that where there are so many cars, it isn’t worth building garages for them. These are all examples of freedom from information! The same sort of thing turns up in the sports pages: ‘match ended in well-deserved victory’—no need to read on, obviously our side won. But if ‘to the surprise of the spectators the jury declared so-and-so the winner,’ so-and-so is obviously not one of ours.”
Innokenty looked around for somewhere to throw away the newspaper. Obviously not realizing that this was another example of un-Soviet behavior! People had already begun looking around at them. Klara took the newspaper from him and held on to it.
“Anyway, sport is the opiate of the people,” Innokenty concluded.
That surprised and offended her. And coming from such a slight person, it didn’t ring at all true.
Klara shook her head indignantly.
“I play tennis a lot and I really love it.”
Innokenty hurriedly corrected himself. “Playing games is fine. What is terrible is the passion for spectator sports. Sports for the mass spectator, football and hockey, make idiots of us.”
The train rattled along. They looked through the window.
“So life is good there?” Klara asked. “Better than here?”
Innokenty nodded. “Better. But still not good. There’s a difference.”
“What is lacking there?”
Innokenty looked at her gravely. His earlier animation had given way to thoughtful calm.
“It’s difficult to say. I find it surprising myself. There’s something missing. In fact, there are many things missing.”
Klara was by now completely at ease with him. She felt in his company an enjoyment that had nothing to do with flirtatious contacts and inflections—there were none—and she wanted to show her gratitude, to make him feel happier and more confident.
“You have . . . such an interesting job,” she said soothingly.
“Who, me?” Innokenty sounded surprised. He had always been thin, and now he looked feeble and half starved. “To work in our diplomatic service, Klara my dear, you need a double wall in your chest. Two thicknesses of skull. And two separate memories.”
He left it at that. Sighed and looked out the window.
Did his wife understand any of this? Did she do anything to encourage and comfort him?
Klara studied him carefully and noticed for the first time a distinctive feature: By itself, the upper part of his face looked quite hard, while the lower part, seen alone, was soft. From his broad and open forehead his features narrowed, slanting downward to a mouth so small and sensitive that it made him look helpless.
The day was getting hot. Woodlands sped merrily past. The route took them through heavily wooded country.
The farther the train went, the fewer city people there were left in the car, and the more conspicuous the two of them became. They looked like actors in costume. Klara took off her gloves.
They left the train at a stop in the forest. Peasant women with shopping bags full of groceries from town emerged from the next car. No one else was left behind with them on the platform.
The young people had meant to go into the forest. There was forest along both sides of the line, but it was dense, dark, and uninviting. As soon as the train moved its tail out of their way, the women walked over a timbered crossing together and made for a place past the trees to the right. Klara and Innokenty followed them.
Immediately beyond the track, grass and flowers grew shoulder high. Then the path plunged into a plantation of birch saplings. Beyond that was a mowed space with a single haycock and a goat tethered to a stake by a long rope, pensively browsing when it remembered to. The forest now closed in on their left, but the women stepped out briskly to the right, into the sunshine, and toward the open ground beyond a few more bushes.
The young people, too, decided that the forest could wait. Right now they were drawn irresistibly into that brilliant sunlight. The way there was by a firm, grassy field path. Between this and the railway line lay a field of some golden grain. Heavy ears on short, sturdy stalks. Whether it was wheat or some other crop they didn’t know, but that made it no less beautiful. On the other side of the path, for almost as far as they could see, lay a bare, plowed field, waterlogged in places, drier elsewhere, with nothing growing on its great expanse. From where the train had stopped, the countryside into which they were now emerging had been invisible. So spacious was it that two eyes could not take it in without a turn of the head. They were shut in now by forest immediately beyond the railway line and in the distance ahead of them forest so dense that it looked like a wall with a serrated edge. Without knowing it, without setting out to find it, this was what they had longed for! Faces upturned to the sky, they stumbled slowly on, stopping now and then to gaze around. The railway line was now concealed by the plantation. Ahead of them, the upper half of a dark redbrick church with a bell tower came slowly into view from a dip in the ground. The peasant women were disappearing in that direction, and soon across the whole landscape there was no one and nothing else to be seen or heard: no human being, no farmstead, no trailer, no abandoned haymaker, nothing but the warm reveling of wind and sun, and birds lost in the void.
In two minutes their earnestness and their worries were forgotten.
“Is this Russia, then? Is this the real Russia?” Innokenty asked happily, squinting into the distance. He stopped and turned toward Klara. “I’m supposed to represent Russia, you know, but my own re-present-ation of Russia is nonexistent. I’ve never just walked around in Russia like this; it’s always been airplanes, trains, big cities. . . .”
He intertwined his fingers with hers, at arm’s length, as children or sweethearts do.
They wandered on like that, looking everywhere except where they were putting their feet. His free hand swung a hat, hers a handbag.
“Listen, Sister!” he said. “I’m so glad we came this way instead of going through the forest. If there’s one thing missing in my life, it’s that: a clear view all around. And a chance to breathe freely!”
“I can’t believe that you don’t see things clearly!” His plaintive tone had touched her. She would have offered him her own eyes if that would help.
“No,” he said, swinging her hand. “I used to, but now everything is mixed up.”
What did he mean? If it was all such a muddle, it couldn’t be just his ideas; it must be his family life. If he had said just a little more, Klara would have found the courage to speak out, show him that she was on his side, that he was right, and that he must not despair!
“It might help to talk about it,” she said tentatively.
But that was all. He had said all he meant to say.
It was getting hot. They took off their raincoats.
As far as the eye could see, there was now no one coming toward them and no one following them.
Occasionally a long train rolled slowly by beyond the screen of trees, almost noiselessly; only the smoke caught their attention.
The peasant women had long ago outdistanced them and turned off the main path. Now they were in the middle of the open field, blurred figures in the bright sunlight. Innokenty and Klara reached the point at which they had turned. A well-trodden path ran over the soft field, losing itself at times in tractor ruts. A path worn by little people tramping obliquely acro
ss the planner’s great rectangular fields on their humdrum errands.
The path led toward the village around the church, but on the way it skirted a remarkable closely planted clump of trees, isolated out in the field, remote from the forest, and almost as far from the village, a strange, cheerful, flourishing copse of tall, straight trees. Small as it was, it dominated and beautified the landscape. Why was it there, out in the open field?
They made their way toward it.
Their hands parted. The path was wide enough only for one. Now Innokenty was walking behind Klara.
He is walking behind you, looking at your back. Looking you over. Your sister’s husband. Your brother, then? Or. . .?
To talk to him, Klara had to stop and turn around.
“What are you going to call me? Just don’t call me Clairette!”
“All right, I won’t. That was before I knew you. In the West they like short pet names, just one or two syllables.”
“So maybe I’ll call you Ink?”
“Go ahead. That’ll do nicely.”
“Does anybody else call you that?”
The field was not as flat as they had thought. Ahead and to the left, there was a gentle downward slope; then the ground rose again to the clump of trees.
They could see now that these were mature birches. Rows of trees formed a rectangle, and others had been planted in the space inside it. There was something very surprising about this copse, so isolated and so detached from the landscape.
“When did it all start?” Klara asked.
“It?” That one little word could cover a number of things.
But he answered readily enough.
“Probably when I started going through my mother’s cabinets. Or maybe even earlier, maybe a whole year earlier, but when I started going through the cabinets. . . .”
“After she died?”
“A long time after, a very long time. Not so long ago, in fact. You see, I . . . No, it’s impossible to explain. . . . Dotty won’t listen or doesn’t understand.”
In the First Circle Page 41
