Despite the Falling Snow

by Shamim Sarif

  “In what way?”

  “In every way. She questioned the way things were run, the way people thought – and in the Soviet Union, anyone who questioned anything was a potential traitor. Because they were thinking outside the usual parameters. And those parameters were hard to escape. We were so cut off from the outside world. From different countries, different cultures and beliefs. It’s hard to imagine such insularity now. But, Katya thought for herself. That’s why she was always evolving, even at her young age. And that ability to think, to ask, to consider, is one of the great gifts that she gave me.”

  He takes a drink of water. “And in return, I left her there to perish.” He knows this is harsh, and not true, but he is melancholy and angry, and in the mood to be brutally flippant.

  “That could hardly have been the case,” Estelle says.

  “It’s not far off,” he replies.

  “What I did was unforgivable. A high-profile, total embarrassment for the government. And they wanted to punish me in the worst way, but I had asylum, and they had no way of touching me. Except for one.”

  His eyes look older now, watery, and profoundly sad. Estelle does not know anything she can say to relieve him.

  “They ruined your life,” she says, softly.

  “They did for a long while. It was hard to let go of.”

  “Have you managed yet?”

  He looks up at her, uncertain of her meaning.

  “To let go? Of Katya? Have you managed yet?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. It may have stopped you moving on. It may still be stopping you,” she adds.

  Once again, the lurch of sudden emotion in his stomach. Is she trying to tell him something?

  “What do you mean, Estelle?”

  “I mean that it may be stopping you from moving on with your life.”

  He hears her, and hesitates, then decides that he must ask the question, that he must know her meaning, or her desire, once and for all.

  “You mean…” he says gently. “With you?”

  “With me?” she replies, and the negative tone of her voice is an icy shock to him. She shakes her head, trying to seem definite, and succeeding, for he is not in control enough to read her well. In truth, his reminiscences of Katya, her brilliance, her dedication, her youth, her daring, have left Estelle feeling more than a little deficient and completely inadequate. She feels that she herself has none of those qualities, and in a life that is passing by faster with each day, she feels little hope of cultivating them.

  “No. I don’t think so,” she says, with a firmness that is overcompensating for the uncertainty that she feels inside. “What is happening between us must find a different ending. But,” she adds, in a voice whose brightness and banality she immediately despises, “there are plenty of fish in the sea.”

  He leaves her at the table a few moments afterwards and makes his way to the bathroom. He feels unsteady, but forces himself to walk purposefully. At the mirror that is fixed over the row of frosted glass basins, he stops and examines himself. Why had he been so thrilled when Estelle had suggested that they go out together? Ostensibly, because he had felt like an afternoon of theatre and he had been pleased for a friend to share it with. There were other reasons, however, reasons he has taken care not to articulate even to himself. The fact that he feels his pulse race whenever he sees her; that the intense look of her startling, intelligent eyes watching him can make him lose his train of thought; that he wants to know more of the thoughts that live behind those eyes; that he has longed to spend more than just an hour or two in her company.

  “Soap, sir?”

  He looks across. Reflected beside him in the mirror is a young man, of about Alexander’s own height and weight. For an odd, head-spinning moment, he feels that he is looking at his younger self. He turns, hastily, to look behind, and the young man is there, in the flesh; no more an apparition than Alexander himself is. He shakes his head slightly.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Soap?”The young man indicates the basin next to him, which he has filled with warm water. He holds up the soap dispenser with an encouraging smile.

  “Thank you,” Alexander says automatically, and holds out his hand. Methodically, he washes up, rinses his hands and takes the small towel that the attendant now offers.

  “Cologne, sir?” the young man asks.

  Alexander looks at him blankly.

  “A splash of cologne, sir. For the ladies,” and he smiles.

  “Ah.” Alexander looks down to see before him an array of colognes and fragrances lined up on a silver tray. The attendant waits a decent interval, then says kindly:

  “My wife loves this one. Says it makes me irresistible.” He holds it up, poised to spray.

  “Your wife?”

  “Yes, sir,” he says, and under Alexander’s keen gaze, a little colour comes up to his cheeks and his dark eyes smile.

  Instinctively, Alexander turns away, and leans back down to the basin where he splashes his face with cold water. Quickly, correctly, the young man puts down his cologne, and hands him another towel. Alexander rubs it over his face, holding it over his eyes for a moment, because just then he does not want to look at that boy and his flushed face and glowing looks. He can feel him waiting behind him, sensitive and aware, holding his breath, not wishing to disturb the troubled old man. Alexander removes the towel, and places it back into the attendant’s outstretched hand. He straightens his tie, and clears his throat. Quick as a flash, he picks up the scent again. Probably, Alexander thinks, he feels I can use as much help as I can get.

  But Alexander simply holds up a hand and does his best to smile. “No, thank you. I just think…I think it’s best to just leave everything as it is.”

  “Good choice. You look perfectly fine as you are, sir.”

  “Thank you,” Alexander says. He hands the young man a five dollar bill, and walks out.

  Estelle wishes that, just once, she could arrive home to a welcoming apartment. One where the hall light is turned on, where perhaps some music is playing in one of the rooms, where there is a welcoming smell of hot toast or even flowers. A home where there is a sign of some life other than her own. Throwing down her handbag, she flicks on the lights, deliberately walking from room to room, illuminating the whole place, except of course for her husband’s study. In the kitchen, she puts on a pot of coffee, and switches on the radio. She is irritable, and restless, and feeling badly for Alexander, and sorry for herself. She knows she is unlikely to see him again, and she feels deeply and surprisingly bereft, stripped of something vital.

  She sits at the table without moving and waits for the coffee to brew. When she has poured herself a cup, and is flicking, unseeing, through the Atlantic Monthly, she hears the slow click of the door down the hall. Something within her stiffens, and she moves her head from side to side, easing a tension in her neck that she has suddenly become aware of. His steps come shuffling down the hall – for some years now, he has ceased to pick up his feet properly when walking – and then he is in the kitchen.

  “Smells good,” he says. “What is it? I’m hungry.”

  “It’s coffee,” she replies.

  He sits down expectantly. In one hand he holds a sheaf of papers, which he does not offer her yet. She can read on his face a look of triumph and relief; it is the look that follows the satisfactory conclusion of a piece of criticism or writing that he has been struggling with. Very soon, he will offer her the papers he is holding to read.

  “It’s nine thirty, Frank. Why didn’t you eat?”

  “I didn’t know what to eat.”

  “I told you. On the phone. Cold cuts.”

  A flicker of recognition. “Ah, yes. I forgot. Just carried on working after we spoke.”

  Stifling a sigh, she stands and goes to the fridge, where she takes out pickles, and meat and bread, and she makes him up a plate, and pours him coffee. While she does this, he tells her what he has been doing – h
ow he has broken through on the Joyce paper he has been working on, and how he is ready to have her read the first draft. He pushes the papers across to where she sits. She sees this from the corner of her eye, but does not look up. She is trying to swallow the irritation and bitterness she feels. She does not want to pick up the paper, does not want to congratulate him, certainly does not want to struggle to read his abstruse prose right at this moment. She almost smiles at the irony – she, who unwillingly spends eighty per cent of her time alone even when he is in the house with her, just wants to be left in peace right now. She places the plate before him but does not yet sit down.

  “Don’t you want to read it?” he asks, biting off a piece of bread.

  “Maybe tomorrow.” She rubs a hand over her eyes. “I’m tired. It’s been a long day.”

  This is where he could ask, if he wanted to, if it even occurred to him – what did you do, what did you eat for dinner, why are you tired? But there is nothing of course; he is simply not used to asking, and so he just nods, manfully trying to cover his disappointment.

  “I’m going to bed, I think, Frank.”

  He nods, crunching into a pickle. “I’ll be in soon. I just want to tidy up the loose ends.” He slides the paper back around to his side of the table and within seconds is absorbed in it again. She wishes him goodnight and goes out.

  In the privacy of their room, she sinks down onto the bed for a few moments. Then she stands, and reaching up above the wardrobe, pulls out a worn, voluminous leather bag. Opening drawers and cupboards, she puts into it her favourite casual clothes, and some spare toiletries. Then she snaps it shut and pushes it under the bed. Without undressing, she lies down on the bed again, and closes her eyes to think over the day that has just ended. Within a few minutes, she has fallen asleep.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Moscow – January 1959

  KATYA HAS FELT INDESCRIBABLY DIFFERENT during the last few days. A feeling of radiance, of sheer weightlessness, has taken her over. It is as though her heavy, blood-filled organs and the solid hard muscle of her heart have been pulled out of her body, and in their place is a suffusion of light. It is an entirely new feeling for her, something she has never before experienced, and she knows it is happening because she has fully revealed herself to him, because at last there is no longer any part of her that is cut off, sealed or contained.

  In her tired grey office, she types letters for the headmistress, her fingers playing over the keys, their clatter soothing the swirl of her thoughts, and tying her to the ground, to her everyday life, albeit with the slightest of threads. It is a pleasurable feeling, to be tugged back down to earth now and then, for it throws into relief the freedom she feels in her heart. Svetlana is stealing more frequent glances than usual at her co-worker, for there is something irresistible about her face today, in the glowing smile that lurks within her dark eyes, and in the quick grace of her movements. When the bell rings, Katya smiles, and offers Svetlana a piece of chocolate, a treat to savour on the way home.

  “Thank you.”

  The girl is thrilled to receive such a gift from Katya. Since she has been married to Alexander, since she has become the wife of such a well-placed young politician, Svetlana has only admired her more. In her eyes, Katya has ascended to the highest level that any young Soviet girl can aspire to. Svetlana takes the chocolate and places it in her mouth, reverently, holding it with her tongue against the roof of her mouth, very lightly, so that it will melt as slowly as possible.

  Alexander’s last hour at his desk drags, but he stays there, in his distraction, not wanting to draw attention to himself, even by something as innocuous as leaving early with a headache. He massages his temples, his fingers pausing, then pulling lightly on his hair. What is he to do? With a strange irony, he has never felt more sure of Katya, and their relationship than he has in this past week, for he has felt at last every crevice of her heart is wholly open to him. But he is sure of nothing else, although there is not a waking moment when he is not turning over in his mind the arguments and ideas that she has been sharing with him.

  He too has disliked Stalin’s regime, and the people who took part in it, although his willingness to face up to the harsh facts has certainly increased since he has met Katya. The burden of awareness has always been the problem; the sheer weight of acknowledgment – of mass starvation in the countryside, directly linked to insane collectivisation policies, of a rule of fear and terror in the cities, and of war and destruction everywhere – has often been too much for people to consider and digest. Easier to keep moving, keep working, keep concentrated on earning the next meal, than to think too carefully about such nightmares and what lies behind them. But the problem for Alexander is that now there is a change; everyone can feel it. He remembers the first, soft breath of it sweeping through the room at that party where he and Katya first met. The results of Khrushchev’s carefully leaked speech to the closed congress. He considers for a moment. He trusts Nikita Sergeyevitch, even where he has been misguided or hurried, and even though there have been mistakes, terrible mistakes. There was the brutal, bloody Soviet response to the revolt in Hungary – a result of panic and confusion, not reasoning. And now, the mass planting of corn in an attempt to emulate the cornfields of America; they all have the sense that Khrushchev’s primary motivation is bravado, not necessity. Now they are beginning to struggle for bread, the people on the street, and they call him the kukuriznik – the maize freak. But even so, his leader is working with a good will, even where his foresight may be lacking. Alexander feels that to be true. Books and magazines are being published now, American books, and more importantly, Russian ones. There are rumours that more are to come, books that tell of the hardships of the gulag and the war.

  But then, he has begun to question the whole communist ethos. The seeds of that questioning had been within him, had been germinating through meetings and work which had been frustrating and often hopeless. But now he wonders if even a good leader and a good government can make something worthwhile of such a system. Oh, Katya, how you have taught me to start thinking. And if every man starts to think for himself, and believe different things, then how can such a system survive?

  And yet, the goals and ideas he has grown up with linger on. He always wanted to work for his country, to make a difference from within the existing framework of government. He had hoped that there would be more revolutions for the Soviet Union, but quiet ones. And things are progressing; there is more accountability, a little more respect for the individual.

  “But they listen to us in our own apartment, Sasha.”

  He does not recall when Katya actually said those words to him, but he hears them now as clearly as if she is standing in the room with him. He glances up at the imposing leather-covered double doors of his office, his head still resting on his hands, but of course there is no-one there. He sighs and looks down again. Maybe she is right. Maybe it is time to make a difference from without. Perhaps it is the only way. Today, at work, he has found something out, some news that he has been dreading. She is in immediate danger. He rubs his head again. There is no way out of this place. And yet, if they stay, they will both end up in prison, or worse.

  There is a knock on his door. It is Sergei, the departmental driver.

  “Working late tonight, comrade?”

  Alexander shakes his head, and gets up. “I have a headache,” he says.

  Sergei smiles, a brown-toothed smile, and puts his cap on his head.

  “Then come, I’ll take you home.”

  From the soft cradle of the back seat, he sits quietly, mind blank, watching the mustard buildings of the central city blur past the window. The movement accentuates the throbbing in his temples, and so he faces forwards, and watches the back of the driver’s head. The head is small, and fits Sergei’s thin, small frame. The fragile bones and unformed muscles of a boy who grew up during the war, hungry. Starved of even the most basic nutrients. There are so many like that, of a slightly unn
atural height and shape. Sergei is from Leningrad, and suffered more than most in surviving the brutal German siege. He has told Alexander how his grandfather, who was already weak from old age, died within weeks of the food supplies being cut, and how his mother then boiled the old man’s shoes over and over again to make a soup from whatever goodness and flavour she could wring from the soaked leather. No one had much back then, but thanks to Alexander’s father’s position, he got through it incomparably better than many other boys his age. When Germany attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, he and his family were evacuated with other government-related families to Kuibyshev. By the edge of the flowing Volga, Alexander lived with his parents and aunt in two small rooms. It was a strange, short interlude in his life, but they were kept safe, distanced from the worst traumas of the war. He puts away the recollections and sighs silently. He is tired, but the weariness is not a physical sensation.

  There are long moments when he finds himself removed from the problems and issues that they are facing now, in these last days before his trip to America. At these moments, his mind returns to the fact of Katya’s betrayal, her lying. He finds himself thinking back to dinners they have had, evenings when he has waited for her to get back from the school, times when she has given him such detail about her day’s work. At which of those times was she lying? Or omitting to tell him the things that really mattered to her? Which of his papers did she pick up from the hall table where he would leave them as he walked in some evenings? He pictures himself in the bath, and Katya outside, silently sliding documents from his bag, photographing them, or copying them, her eyes darting up now and then to the closed bathroom door. Her open smile when he emerges, clean and shaved. He is so regular in his routine that she must have been able to calculate to the minute the time she had for reading. For stealing.

  He is staring out of the window at his own building, his eyes focused far away from it, when he realizes that the car is stationary. He sits up abruptly, catching Sergei’s amused look in the mirror, and taking up his neat pile of papers, he gets out. He leans down to the driver’s window, which is slightly open to the frosty evening.