by David Szalay
16
YOU KNOW WHAT happens now. The note from Nikita Stepanovich. He said he wanted to see me about something important, and knocked on the door in the early evening, just when I was starting to wonder where you were. ‘Nikitka!’ I said. I had not seen him for over a year, not since Epshteyn’s funeral. I was surprised how much weight he had put on, even since then, though of course he was very stocky and muscular in his youth, and men like that often turn obese later.
Still wheezing from the stairs, he took off his hat – there wasn’t much hair left underneath it – and I helped him out of his wet raincoat. He loosened the collar of his white shirt. His manner was very serious and unsmiling.
‘How are you?’ I said.
‘I’m okay.’
He did not seem to want to spend time on pleasantries, so I said, ‘What is it? What can I do for you?’
‘Irishka’s left,’ he said.
‘What?’
He sighed. ‘She’s left.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘She’s moved in with us.’ Sweating nervously, he wiped his face with a handkerchief. ‘I know it’s not a nice thing to have to tell you –’
‘What are you talking about? What’s going on?’
‘I think you know what.’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘You’ve been seeing someone else.’
‘What?’
‘You heard me.’
‘What are you talking about?’ I shouted. ‘Where’s Irina?’
‘Oh stop it. There’s no point.’
‘Where is she?’
‘She’s at my house,’ he snapped. ‘And I might be angry too, Sasha. She is my sister …’
‘What has she told you?’
‘It’s not what she’s told me. I’ve seen it with my own eyes.’
‘What?’
‘I’ve seen it with my own eyes.’
‘Seen what? What have you seen?’
‘I’ve seen you with her. With Lozovskaya.’ He thought he had me. I must have looked shocked. I was shocked – I was shocked that he knew the name. I had not told you the name. ‘What do you mean?’ I said.
‘I’ve been watching you. Irishka said she suspected something. She asked me to look into it.’
‘Look into what?’
‘Your involvement with Lozovskaya. Why deny it? It just makes you look silly.’
‘Deny what?’
‘A few days ago,’ he said, slightly shamefaced, ‘I followed you when you left work …’
‘You followed me?’
‘I followed you. Yes. I followed you. I’m sorry. Irishka said she suspected something. So I followed you. You went to a flat on Karl Libknekht Street. You were there for an hour or two. I waited outside. When you left, I went in and spoke to some of the neighbours. They said you were there virtually every day …’
‘That isn’t true.’
‘That you were sometimes there in the evenings. That you sometimes went out with her. I had a photo of you – they identified you.’
‘This is a joke …’
‘Is it? They said the room she lives in was formerly occupied by a Jew called Shtern, who was arrested last month. They said you moved her in soon after. I didn’t think you did things like that, Sasha.’
‘Like what?’
‘You know what I mean. They say you take her presents. Scent. Underwear. Shoes. They say you’re her lover. They’re sure of it.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s obvious. Why deny it?’
‘It’s not true!’
‘I’ve seen it with my own eyes.’
‘Seen WHAT?’
‘That you practically live there!’
‘You’ve seen nothing!’
‘Several times I’ve seen you spend hours in there.’
‘There’s nothing to see!’
‘Do you think I’m an idiot?’ he shouted. ‘Do you think I’m a total idiot?’
‘I want you to leave! Leave!’
We stared at each other. Then, slowly, he stood up and took his things. He sighed sadly. ‘Will you come and speak to her?’ he said. ‘Maybe if you say you’re sorry …’
‘No! I’m not sorry. I’ve done nothing. She should be sorry, for spying on me! And you should be sorry!’ I was shouting, following him out into the hall. Zalesky and his family were sitting down to supper in the kitchen. They pretended not to notice us. Nikita was obviously embarrassed to be part of this scene. He edged his way out, holding his hat.
He was there again a few days later. You know that – you sent him. ‘We were expecting you,’ he said.
‘Why?’ I said. ‘I told you. I’ve done nothing.’
He nodded, putting some of your underwear into a holdall. ‘Still, we were expecting you …’
‘YOU were?’
‘Irishka was …’
That’s what he said. You were expecting me! What for? You were the one who had walked out! You walked out on me without saying a word. What were you expecting me for?
I said to Nikita, ‘How long is she planning to stay with you?’
He shut the holdall and shrugged. ‘I don’t know. She can stay for as long as she likes.’
‘Why is she staying with you?’ I said. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘We’re waiting for you,’ he said.
A week later he was there again. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Just say you’re sorry. Is that too much to ask?’
‘Sorry for what?’
He shut his eyes sanctimoniously. ‘Just say you’re sorry …’
‘I’ve done nothing to be sorry for!’
‘If you say you’re sorry – and obviously stop seeing this woman – things might be okay.’
‘Might they?’
‘You look terrible, Sasha,’ he said. ‘I want to help you patch things up. That’s why I’m here.’
‘If you want to help patch things up, tell your stupid sister to stop being so stupid.’
‘Don’t talk about Irishka like that,’ he said.
And I said, ‘Fuck you.’
When he had left I started to drink.
17
HE HAS HUGELY overslept. It is nearly eight. The electric light is still on in the kitchen, and the bottle of Ararat Armenian konyak still on the table. He is surprised how little of it there is left. He was sure there was more than a few meagre millimetres of the stuff when he went to sleep – something of which he has no memory. For a minute, not used to the pain, he tries to pretend that it is a normal morning. He lights the stove, the hissing blue teeth, sets the pan over it to make his tea … No. No, it is not working. The hangover is like an intimation of mortality. It is like a foretaste of the pain of the last illness, when – in the fire of whatever it is that is killing him – he will find death preferable to persisting in this world, though it is surely the only world there is. He extinguishes the stove – silences its tiny hiss, which was hurting his head – and shuffles into the still shrouded bedroom. Lying there in a tight foetal position, in time the pain dies down to a quiet flame, only licking his outline. If he stays totally still for long enough it will slowly sink to a mere ember. There is a profound vacancy in his head. No thoughts, no memories. Perhaps this is the oblivion the konyak promised, the only sound the tired jostle of his own heart.
He sleeps until the early afternoon. Then – feeling spectral, weightless – he wanders into the living room. Steady rain is blackening the stout boughs of the cherry tree, the leaves of which are starting to fade and fall. He switches on the radio. The news. Kissinger is in Moscow – his wailing motorcade is just leaving the airport. The news-reader says he is there to talk about nuclear disarmament and Vietnam – Le Duc Tho is also in town – and trade. Trade. In other words, the integration of the USSR into the international financial system, as a prelude to the reintroduction of free market principles to the Soviet economy … Still very hungover, he does not feel strong enough to face this sort of thing, and switches off the radio, interrupting the next n
ews item – ‘For a second day, Israeli aircraft have attacked targets in Syria and –’
In the near-silence – there is only the quiet sound of the rain – he pulls the page from the typewriter. The last words he typed were When he had left I started to drink. That was what had inspired him to take the konyak from the top shelf, where it had stood for so many years. He pours what is left of it down the sink. When he had left … Nikita Stepanovich. Dead. Heart attack. 1965. Once, in their early teens, they were inseparable friends. Nikita was one of the other ‘Epshteynites’. Aleksandr has no memory of their first meeting – it would have happened in September 1924. Even the idea of ‘their first meeting’ seems strange to him. It is more or less impossible, now, for him to imagine himself in his former state of not-knowing-Nikita. His former state. He saw Sverdlovsk for the first time on an autumn afternoon of perpetual twilight. He had never seen so many people and horses. He had never seen electric light. Most of the pupils were the sons of industrial workers, and they seemed like hostile foreigners to him. When he thought of the house in the village, of the earthen floor where he slept with Ivan, on a straw-filled mattress in summer and sheepskins in winter, he had to hide his tears. The school was warm and there was always enough to eat. The teachers were mostly tough men – some of them, like Epshteyn, veterans of the Civil War, though mostly without Epshteyn’s intellect. The emphasis was not so much on intellectual excellence as the inculcation of an ethos, and in this environment differences were quickly effaced as the shared experience of the school shaped all the pupils in the same way. The way they spoke, for instance. Surprisingly quickly, the peasants’ sons lost their old ways of speaking. They spoke like their urban peers, and used their slang. Within a few months it was impossible to tell them apart, and Aleksandr felt more at home with Nikita Stepanovich’s family, with whom he spent the holidays, than with his own.
There were four sisters, and it was one of the others – he sometimes forgets this – with whom he was infatuated for several years in his teens. She was older than him, and when he heard of her engagement to an engine driver he thought his life was over. She went to live in Novosibirsk and he soon forgot her.
His first specific memory of Irina. She is wearing a white shift, like a nightdress. It is May Day, the parade. She has no shoes on and the soles of her feet are black. Her father was a shock-worker, and the family had their own flat in a new development near the machine factory, Uralmash. The development was designed by a famous German architect who inspected it one day, passing along the plain corridors in his Homberg, surrounded by officials. He stood in the living room of the flat, putting questions to Irina’s father through an interpreter. Irina was there, ignoring Aleksandr, who was ignoring her. What they did together was still a secret from her family. She had instigated it, one afternoon when they were alone in the flat. Unlike him, she was not a virgin.
In October he went to Moscow to study law at the OGPU Higher School. Everyone was impressed that he had won a place there. There was a party the night before he left, and in the morning she went with him to the station. No one had seen him off from a station since his mother, from the tiny wind-tousled platform at Basmanovo in 1924. Wet snow was falling, melting on the tall black locomotive. Wet feet left prints in the pale slush. He told her not to wait. She was wet and shivering. He kissed her the way he had seen people kissing in films – her face was numb – and settled himself in the train. Then, when it started to move, he heard her voice shouting ‘Sasha!’ and shoved down the window.
Sasha!
She was there, on the platform, trying to keep pace with the train. She had waited, and more than forty years later the sound of her voice is present to his mind with such untarnished precision that it seems it has only just stopped.
Sasha!
He stayed at the open window, with his face in the wind, until one of the other passengers – he had forgotten about them – told him to shut it. Which he did, and sat down wiping his eyes on his sleeve.
There was then, in 1930, a sense of excitement about everything. Following the slow, tactical twenties it seemed that the Revolution was finally under way, with the end of private manufacturing and trade, the industrialisation of the first Five Year Plan, the establishment of the kolkhoz system, and the formation of a new Soviet working-class intelligentsia, of which he was so proud to be a member. All these things seemed to be happening with a sudden unstoppable momentum, while the imperialist world staggered through the slump that would destroy its unjust economic structure.
Sinyavsky, the head of the OGPU Higher School, was addressing the students in the summer of 1932. It was the end of the university year, a hot June day. The sunny gymnasium was full of students in their white cadets’ uniforms. Sinyavsky, also in uniform, was unusually solemn. ‘The Civil War,’ he said, ‘did not end in 1921 – it did not end at all. It is well known that after their defeat many Whites, those who could not escape abroad, pretended to be Communists, and entered the state, party, and security services, especially in places far from Moscow. They never truly accepted their defeat, and they never lost their old loyalties. So among the millions of people who participated in the victorious struggle to overthrow the tsar, and who joined the Communist Party, there were, unfortunately, some who did so for reasons other than fighting for the proletariat and for Communism, and in time a number of these people found themselves in important positions in the party, the state and the armed forces.’ Sinyavsky paused, and surveyed the several hundred young, serious faces in front of him, among them Aleksandr’s, near the front, the wool of his uniform prickling his neck in the heat. ‘In the twenties,’ Sinyavsky went on, ‘they tried to achieve their ends through politics, these people, the Rightists. They even tried to take control of the party and its policies. They failed in this. Now they have turned to more desperate methods – to wrecking, violence, murder, terrorism. What they tried to achieve through politics in the past, they now try to achieve through violence. This is the new situation.’ They listened in sober silence while he listed the plots that had been foiled that year, all of them involving party members, some even members of the Central Committee. The Riutin conspiracy, the Eismont-Tolmachev-Smirnov conspiracy, Trotsky’s conspiracies with his supporters still in the USSR – such as Radek, Smilga and Preobrazhensky – and his letter to the Central Committee, written from his hiding place in Mexico, in which he explicitly threatened the Soviet state with terrorist violence.
*
He was always surprised, when he saw her for the first time from the still-just-moving train, waiting for him in the humid June air or the fog of December, how pretty she was. Her smile. Her slightly Asiatic eyes. Asiatic in shape – they were blue. It was somehow strange to see her there. The first time, he did not know what to expect. There was a sort of trepidation. They eyed each other like strangers on the icy platform. Kissed on the mouth with a sort of formality. They had written to each other – passionate, unwary letters – which only made it stranger to be warily face to face, pink-nosed, and not quite as they were in their memories of each other. Her eyes were watering in the frozen air. She laughed. ‘What?’ he said. It was mid-afternoon. She had left work early. The flat was empty and as soon as the door was shut they tumbled fumbling onto the floor. With her skirt around her waist she was still wearing her scarf, though her rabbit-skin hat had fallen off. They were lucky that the flat was empty – it was the school holidays and her grandmother had taken the younger siblings skating. There was a scarcity of solitude.
In summer, of course, there was outdoors. There was the path, usually unnoticed, to the side of the Uspenskaya Church, shrunk to little more than a parting in the vegetation, variegated with warm white blotches of sunlight. It led to a stream, which in turn flowed under foliage into the Iset a few kilometres south of the town, where, though wide, it slid in whispering shallows over stones.
In winter it was less easy to find places. Once they used the nightwatchman’s hut of a warehouse which was shut for
the New Year holiday. The nightwatchman was her uncle, and was away for a few days. The weather was mild, unsettled, overcast. A midwinter thaw. Inside, the hut was filthy and extremely damp, infested with woodlice and spiders. In the night the sleet drummed on the old newspaper over the window. They slept pressed together in the valley of the mattress. In the morning there were human voices in the street outside.
In the suitcase under his bed, he finds the photograph of her which he took to Moscow – a smiling studio shot – in an old envelope. (On the envelope is written, in her handwriting, his name and the words, Feliks Dzerzhinsky Higher School, 48 Pelshe Street, Moscow. For a few moments he stares at those words. They are extraordinarily evocative, more so even than the photograph itself. They make him sigh tearfully. She had the elegant handwriting of the semi-educated. Her father, though a Communist, had old-fashioned ideas on subjects such as the education of women, and she left school at eleven. Her mother was illiterate.) There are other photographs in the envelope. The wedding photo from 1934, unframed, and stored as mere memor a bilia – he in his new NKVD lieutenant’s uniform, twenty-two years old, black-haired, staring into the camera with an intently serious expression. And Irina, smiling, holding her lilies. The photographer was striving for the tone of the silver screen, fussing with props and silk flowers. (Irina’s lilies were made of silk.) Aleksandr was impatient with him. The photographer understood what he was making though – understood that a wedding photo is not so much a memory as an idea. That it must transcend the the sharp toxic smells of the studio, the oppressive summer heat, the struggle of the fly on the skylight. That it is in fact a symbol of such transcendence, no less an instrument of faith than the sooty ikons of Aleksandr’s faint memories of his parents’ house, or the portraits of Lenin in every public place.
