by Shamim Sarif
“You mean a brand new novel?”
“Sure. Any ideas?”
Alexander is watching her, Estelle knows, and she turns to meet his look for a second.
“A few.”
“Care to share them?” Alexander asks, handing her a glass.
“Not just yet,” says Estelle. “Genius can’t be rushed, you know.”
Chapter Ten
Moscow – August 1956
THE RESTAURANT HAS BEEN LOUD and smoky and filled with talk, laughter and dancing. It is a Georgian restaurant, on the ground floor of an apartment block near her own. The food is rich with tomatoes, nuts and spices, the atmosphere carefree; somehow reflective of that southern heritage. They finish their meal – a chicken satsivi and some fried aubergine, and they watch two soldiers dancing with three women in the centre of the room. They are stamping their feet and swinging around – the people at the tables closest to them are having to be careful of their drinks. But everyone is smiling – their enthusiasm and excitement are contagious. Alexander watches Katya watching the dancers.
It is the end of the week, and both of them have had a busy time at work. Alexander is happy to be here with her, but he can’t help but feel tired and subdued, eroded by a poor week of meetings and discussions that he feels have led only backwards. She is smiling as she watches the dancing, but her eyes are not part of the smile. She has been lively this evening, and he has hardly been able to take his eyes from her, but at the same time, something is making him uneasy. She seems to be behaving with him as she sometimes does with other people whom she does not know so well – not falsely, but not altogether relaxed. There is an air of effort about her convivial conversation and about her laughter, and he wonders inwardly if something might be bothering her.
He drinks down his last mouthful of sweet Georgian wine, and fills her glass with what remains in the bottle. She looks at him.
“You look so young with your haircut,” she says, reaching across to ruffle his hair. He puts a defensive hand to his head, and laughs.
“Do I look like a boy?” he asks.
She smiles and shakes her head. Then she leans across the table and kisses him, a light brush of the lips that lingers over his mouth, becoming slowly deeper, until he can taste her tongue running lightly over his own, can feel her mouth pulling at his. After a minute, she moves away, leaving him dizzy. Then she turns back to watch the dancing as though there is nothing else of interest to her just now. The shadows that play about her face tonight are textured and thick, accentuated by the array of lamps and candles that light the restaurant.
He passes her another piece of the khachapuri bread that she likes, rich with cheese and eggs, and she breaks off a bite and washes it down with the last of her wine.
They walk back to her apartment, holding hands, not speaking. The late-night air is cool, even here, where the narrow streets are bound by high, grey buildings, and he is happy. Even his fatigue is pleasurable when it is relieved by her company. When they reach her apartment, he walks behind her up the stairs. The concrete walls and tiny stairwells are oppressive, and he is relieved to get away from them, even into her small, dark living space. Maya, as usual, is still out. Maya’s mother is asleep in her tiny cupboard of a room, the door tightly shut. They go into the bedroom and Alexander sits on the foot of her bed, draws her to him, and kisses her.
“Happy anniversary,” he says.
It is not a particularly significant day, but while they have been strolling home, he has been calculating in his mind, and has come to the conclusion that today they have been together for five months exactly. Katya looks up with a jerk, almost as though he has reached over and slapped her. She stares at him coolly.
“What is it?” he asks, feeling a mild panic grip him.
“What are you talking about?” she replies. Her tone is harsh.
“I was just thinking…. I was just thinking that we have been together exactly five months. Today. An anniversary.”
“Oh.” She stands up abruptly, upset still, and embarrassed. As she knew would happen, he is on his feet in a moment, and has moved to hold her, but it is hard for him to do so for she has the palms of her hands pressed over her eyes. He holds her from behind, cradling her in his arms, and kissing her neck.
“What is it, Katyushka? What is it, my love?” he asks, and despite herself, she feels the tears begin to fall. He holds her more tightly.
“Is it so bad to be with me?”
She laughs, slightly, as she weeps, and shakes her head. He kisses her hair. He can smell the metallic, inky smell of the school in it.
“Tell me. What are you thinking about?” He pauses. “What anniversary?”
Almost at once, the sobbing stops, and her body has stiffened beneath his hands.
“Come here,” he says, and he takes her hand and pulls her down onto the thin mattress, and lies next to her, precariously close to the edge of the narrow bed, shifting closer so that her head is against his shoulder, and his arms are around her. She has stopped crying, and he waits, rubbing the top of her back gently, as if soothing a child, and he listens to the breath entering and leaving her, rhythmic and slowing.
“Tell me,” he says, and for the first time, she does.
“Fourteen years ago today,” she says, as though beginning a bedtime story, “I was sitting at the table in my parents’ house. Having dinner.” She stops to take a deep, ragged breath, and then she smiles.
“I loved that table. It was a big wooden thing that my grandfather brought on the back of a cart from his dacha years ago. We all had our own places at that table, and our parents let each of us carve our names into the underside of it, at the places where we each sat. It was easy, the wood was soft.” She stops and looks at Alexander. He is thinking whether to ask her where the table is now, but decides against it.
“They were quite strict, my parents. They never let us do anything like that usually. But anyway, they let us put our names in the table. We were all there, both of them, my brother and myself. They were laughing a lot over dinner, my mother and father. There had been some joke at the university, some piece of research that had crossed over into both of their fields – I forget exactly what – and they were explaining it to us, and they were excited and happy that the unthinkable had happened, and they would have to work together for a while.”
“Go on,” says Alexander, softly and with trepidation, for he knows how the story must end, even if he has waited this long to hear from her how it started.
“We were sitting there, having dinner. I was twelve, Yuri quite a bit older. I was the afterthought, the baby they didn’t expect. They were so shocked when they found my mother was pregnant,” she adds, with a quick laugh. She is telling him things now that he already knows, putting off the moment when she must put into words the thing she has never spoken of before. He puts his lips to her forehead and waits, and after a moment, she speaks again.
“We had finished the meal, almost, and we were about to have dessert – I remember, because we rarely had any, not during the war anyway, and I was looking forward to it – when there was a knock at the door. That knock that for the last ten years people always waited for, but never really believed would happen to them. People are so stupid sometimes. We were stupid. Maybe to survive. Better to blind yourself to the danger than have a heart attack every time someone knocks at the door. Anyway, nobody was nervous. No-one thought twice about opening that door, although I suppose it would have made no difference if we had tried not to. We all knew that Stalin was arresting people, all over again. Jumpy from the war. Looking for collaborators, more enemies of the people, as though any could have been left after the thirties. But that knock was supposed to come at three in the morning, not nine at night. That gave us a false sense of security, I suppose, even though we all already knew someone who had been interrogated, or who had been imprisoned, or killed. Especially my parents. They knew lots of so-called intelligentsia. That was what they were, after all. An
d non-conformist intelligentsia at that. The worst sort of people.”
He is stroking her hair, but she seems oblivious now, her voice brittle and still carrying the residual sound of tears. She is staring up at the ceiling, watching the whole scene again.
“So we opened the door – Yuri did, I remember, because my parents were still at the table, still talking, one eye and ear on the door, waiting to see who had come to visit. And then they were inside, pushing Yuri to one side – poor Yuri, he used to blame himself after that for opening the door, as if that would have changed anything. And they showed some papers – some kind of stupid identification – and they grabbed my father by both arms, shouting that they were arresting him for crimes against the State, and then my mother, too; they pulled her up, and her chair fell over, and my father was shouting at them not to hurt her, and we were watching, just shocked, I think. There seemed to be so many of them, but you know, there were only three men. They just seemed so powerful. They were so powerful. They had my parents out of our apartment in a matter of seconds. Seconds. They did not even have time to turn their heads and look back at us, or say anything to us. By the time I ran forwards, crying for my mother, she was gone. There was no trace of her, or my father. We never saw them again.”
Her eyes are bright, but she is not crying, and he holds her, his own tears dropping unnoticed into her thick, black hair.
“I felt so helpless,” she is saying. “So helpless, and lost. I miss them so much, Sasha. I miss my mother so much.”
In his short life, Alexander has rarely encountered situations when he does not know how to respond, or what action to try. He has simply never been faced with such raw emotional trauma in someone he loves, the kind of primeval pain that no-one outside can heal. He watches the narrow shadows thrown about the room by the streetlight outside. Her back and shoulders start to shake with sobs that she cannot control, and he tries to hold her even more closely. Then, after a few minutes, she sits up on the bed, and glances at him, her face tear-streaked and red, and she pushes back her hair and stands up. He reaches out to hold onto her still, but she is back to herself now, and she touches his face gratefully and releases herself from his hands.
“Yuri looked everywhere for them. The Lubyanka, the Butyrka prison, the police stations. It was as though they had vanished into thin air. How did he get away with that for so long?” she whispers.
“Fear,” Alexander says. “He ruled with fear. We were all relieved when it was over.” Then he regrets what he has said, for while his dislike of Stalin is mainly intellectual, hers comes from an emotional pain he can barely imagine.
“Not all. Not even most, Sasha. Everyone was distraught when he died. Even your father.”
“Not in the same way.”
She lets it go, but he knows what she means. His father, who was so disenchanted by Stalin, was still devastated by his death. Millions of Soviets, most people, were. The emotional reliance on their leader had been so deeply rooted, the respect that grew from fear was so ingrained, his insidious charm so great, that it was difficult for people to imagine how the country would cope without him. Or how it would even exist without him.
But since Stalin’s death, Alexander thinks, his father has allowed himself to think about things in a more balanced manner, less emotionally perhaps. He has allowed himself to deconstruct the source of his disillusionment and disgust. Khrushchev’s early, far-reaching movement towards de-Stalinization helped to shock him and others like him into reconsidering the years that had gone before – to face the fact that the torturous methods of terror were a direct result of Stalin’s orders and way of governing. And even now when Khrushchev panics that he is losing control of his reforms, and makes sudden reversals into stiff, harsh governance, such reversals only throw into relief the inconsistencies and injustice of the system that they became used to. His father, Alexander thinks, has become a man that sees that his life is not built on a series of solid, upright bricks, as he had once thought, but on a set of rubber, shifting blocks that are beginning to show holes.
“When did you find out what had happened to them?”
Katya can do no more than whisper now. “Maybe six months later. We were lucky to ever find out I suppose. Apparently they were taken straight to a state farm owned by the NKVD. At Kommunarka, just outside the city. No-one knew that it was one of the secret places they sent people to be killed. They refused to sign confessions that they were enemies of the people. But then there was a report that Yuri saw – he bribed an official – it said that my father had stated for the record that he had been wrongly arrested – that is was Stalin who was the enemy of the people.” A twisted smile passes briefly over her face. “I’m sure it was true. That he said it. My father always had a good sense of irony.”
“And so they shot them. My father was a historian, a good one, and therefore an intellectual terrorist and my mother…well, my mother’s mistake was to be his wife. To support him. Those six months, waiting to find out if they were dead or alive were the worst. I had such dreams. That someone was holding my father over a balcony. I would watch, wait, on a knife-edge, praying they would pull him back. But always, with the gentlest, lightest movement, the hand would let go of him, and he would fall to his death. I would wake up crying, I was so sick with sadness.” She clears her throat. “Don’t make me think about it any more.”
She walks out, away, into the hallway into the tiny, damp bathroom, and looks at herself in the mirror. “Sasha?”
“Yes?”
As she suspected, he has followed her and is waiting outside, in the dank hallway. Above him, in the corners of the low ceiling, he can see patches of dampness and the white bloom of mildew beginning to take hold.
“What are you doing with me? Misha told me once that he tried to warn you away from me the first time we met. At the dance.”
“I didn’t even hear him,” Alexander replies. “I was a man possessed.”
He sees the shaking of her head amongst the shadows in the bathroom, as she watches herself in the mirror.
“Ah, but possessed of what, now?” she asks, without humour, and she leans down to splash icy water on her face. She feels sorry for him for a moment, for even though he is the same age as she, she can feel his childlike helplessness in the face of her grief and anger. She runs a hand over her burning eyes, and thinks to herself that she will go in and lie down next to him and let him hold her, and let his warmth and love enclose her in so that she does not have to see or hear anything else ever again. That will help her, and it will help him also. But for now she remains standing there, fiddling with her hair, for she is thinking. She looks at her eyes in the mirror, and knows they are the same as her mother’s, and from this starting point she tries to reconstruct her mother’s face as she recalls it – the rough, dark hair, the high, broad forehead and long nose, uneven from some childhood mishap. The face appears to her – a face, any face really, not truly as it was. She is trying too hard to see it, and it has been too long, and Katya herself was too young. All these circumstances conspire against the retaining of the perfect memory, and she sighs. She comes out to the hallway and together they walk back to her room.
“I can’t even remember what my mother looks like,” she tells him, and he nods and walks her back to the bed. His body is warm compared to the cold air of the apartment, and she closes her eyes, places her mouth and nose almost flat against his chest and breathes his smell and listens to the blood pulsing around his body. Now she will begin once more the process of forgetting it, that terrible thing that once happened, so many years ago. And what a hard process it is, every time she recalls it, to then tame it and push all of it back into the farthest, unlit recesses of her memory where it will never stay willingly, but lies waiting like a sly, hungry animal; waiting for her guard to drop, for her shell to crack open and let it back in.
She feels safer with Alexander’s arms around her, and his sensitive, kind eyes watching over her, but she also feels brittle an
d cold inside. She had made notes on the information she had gleaned from his papers that night, several weeks ago, and she passed them to Misha the next day. He had been satisfied in some way, and since then, she has not had to do anything similar. But since that evening she has begun to dislike herself, and the feeling of self-disgust is especially strong at times like this, when Alexander is watching over her with more care and adoration than she has ever received in her life. She sighs. Perhaps she will not think so hard about it for a while. Just for a few weeks. She is too confused to consider anything properly now. Perhaps she will just relax a little, and enjoy her time with him, and then, when Misha wants her to begin work, she can decide what to do. She feels tears prick at her eyes again, and tries biting her lip to hold them back, but they will not be held. They are tears of anger at what happened to her parents, tears of self-pity for the lost child she remembers being, and tears of frustration at the dilemma she now feels, because she is not at all sure that there is any decision to be made by her, about Alexander; she is almost sure that there is no way out.
Chapter Eleven
Boston
ESTELLE OPENS HER FRONT DOOR. She is dressed entirely in black – trousers, a turtle neck and a scarf that swathes softly over her shoulders. The effect is elegant, effortless. A faint smile of approval passes over Lauren’s lips as Estelle shows her in, guiding her to a drawing room which Lauren takes in with a precise glance. The original floorboards are exposed, sanded and varnished to a warm brown colour which matches the outside of the fireplace. On top of the mantel is a photograph of Melissa as a child, sitting on her father’s shoulders. There is an element of the dashing, the Bryonesque, about Professor Johnson in the photograph. His face shows a casual pride as he holds onto his child. Melissa is smiling, the kind of fully released expression that is so much more common in children than adults. Lauren looks away, to a couple of old rugs placed beneath leather sofas. The soft grain and folds of the leather might make an interesting background, she thinks, and she suggests that Estelle take a seat there. Tinged with self-consciousness, Estelle takes a few moments to find a comfortable position, but Lauren is busy unfolding her easel and setting out her pencils.
