Although, it was true, they never left Kostya alone—they took turns going out. And if they would be gone overnight, they called on Faina Ivanovna. During the past two months, they had asked Afanasy Mikhailovich to look after Kostya only once. He had taken him up to his workshop, and the child had lent him a hand. He was a smart boy.
On Saturdays, Antonina Naumovna arrived in the gray Volga, laden with cake and groceries. She organized the Sunday family dinner. The new fiancé avoided running into her for a long time; when the weekend rolled around, he would make himself scarce. Only at the beginning of April did they finally meet. Antonina’s anticipatory hostility was not misplaced: she didn’t like him. How could she? Except for his curly head of hair. But otherwise—his face was gaunt, his nose was like a crow’s beak, his lips were thick and red, like he was feverish. He cut an absurd figure: narrow shoulders, spindly legs; he looked like he might snap in two at the waist. His trousers were tight, and they bulged out in front, as if they were well-packed. But he was a scrawny little runt! Ugh.
Antonina nodded, pursing her lips.
“Pleased to meet you. I’m Antonina Naumovna.”
“Ilya.”
“And your last name?
“Ilya Isayevich Bryansky,” he said.
Bryansky is just Bryansky, Antonina Naumovna reasoned, bringing her accumulated expertise in categorizing personnel to bear. But Isayevich! Only priests and Jews were named after prophets … and Old Believers. She knew this issue inside and out, having had to defend herself on this count her whole life.
But what did the girl see in him? She had traded Vova, such a decent sort, and a good husband, for this scraggly beanpole. And, what was worse, Kostya couldn’t take his eyes off him, and crawled up and down him like he was some sort of human tree.
When they were at the table, the young family started giggling. Antonina Naumovna noticed that Ilya had tossed a little ball of bread onto Kostya’s plate, and Kostya sprinkled salt on his, as if by chance. Olga sat there with a dumb grin on her face, screwing up her eyes … Ilya ate two pieces of the cake. He licked the cream off the top, like a cat. And he ate up the rest of Kostya’s. And he sucked on his spoon. Disgusting! Afanasy shouldn’t have allowed them to move in. Let them fend for themselves; they’ve had it far too easy in life. And a spiteful dry tear clouded her eye …
Olga’s poor parents couldn’t imagine what on earth this unprepossessing suitor was up to, why the typewriter keys clattered ceaselessly into the night, and why he always had to rush off, abandoning the peaceful luxuries of the dacha. But Olga knew: she was the one who typed all the anti-Sovietism from the onionskin paper. Granted, Olga was not entrusted with any sizable texts. She had neither the speed nor the skill for that. She opted for the poetry, most often Osip Mandelstam and Joseph Brodsky. She considered this to be a kind of community service. The thick books were passed on to more dexterous typists, who were paid for the work—either Galya Polukhina, a girlhood friend, or Vera Leonidovna, a professional typist.
Sometimes Ilya delivered the pages to his friend Artur, to be bound, and sometimes he distributed them just as they were. Artur made lovely volumes of poetry covered in chintz. Books of a religious nature were bound appropriately—in leatherette or plain calico. It wasn’t easy to pin him down, though. He forgot about what he had agreed to do, and when it was expected to be finished. Ilya made a living from samizdat. Contrary to most of these other heirs of Gutenberg, his intellectual contemporaries, he felt no moral qualms about material compensation. He expected to be well paid for his time and effort, and he invested his earnings in his photography and his expanding archive.
What an abundance of poems there was! What lyrical abundance! Never before nor after had there been such a time in Russia. Verses filled the airless space, and themselves became the air people breathed—albeit “stolen air,” in the words of Mandelstam. The Nobel Prize, it seemed, was not the supreme literary honor. Rather, it was the honor of being printed and read on these dry, rustling pages, crudely typed or handwritten, full of misprints and errors, sometimes barely legible—conferred on Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, and, finally, Brodsky.
“Our high-school literature teacher, Victor Yulievich Shengeli, is someone you ought to meet. You’d really like him. He hasn’t taught for a long time, though. He works in some museum—trying to escape notice.”
The Soviet authorities persecuted the unemployed, including those whom they themselves banned from official employment. The “parasite” Joseph Brodsky had already been released from exile in the village of Norenskaya, but no one could have anticipated that fifty years hence, a memorial room would be established in the local library in his name, and that a down-at-the-heels woman in her waning years would show people around, calling the tour “Brodsky in Norenskaya.”
Olga became more and more adept at translation. She had studied French at university, and Spanish at night school. She picked up Italian as well, studying it on her own in the commuter train on the way to and from the dacha. She made connections, and was sometimes asked to translate film scripts, a task she was very good at. She did other forms of moonlighting—writing research papers, patents. Her earnings were meager at first, but they grew steadily. These jobs were all “unofficial,” of course—officially she was registered as a research assistant, like Ilya. This was a front used by many people at the time.
After the death of his former father-in-law, Ilya found someone else who would register him as an assistant. For Olga, he found an old professor willing to take her on as a secretary. They both joined some sketchy labor union that seemed tailor-made for people trying to evade the Soviet authorities.
At the dacha, Ilya rigged up a darkroom in the broom closet next to the bathroom. He ran a pipe from the WC into the broom closet, just as he had done back in his school days, and performed his magic there during the nights. Afanasy Mikhailovich didn’t notice a thing, since he bathed only on Saturdays. The rest of the week he never so much as glanced at the bathroom or the broom closet.
What happy years they had together! Ilya divorced his first wife. Eventually, without much fuss or bother, he and Olga got married. Olga devoted herself to him heart and soul. Everything he said or did was fascinating and unprecedented: samizdat, photography, travel—he adored the Russian Far North, the Central Asian south, and often set out for the back of beyond. Sometimes he took Olga and Kostya along with him.
Once they took a trip to the region around Vologda—to Belozersk and Ferapontovo. Kostya remembered this long afterward as a magical journey. Everything that happened, every hour of every day, stayed in his memory like a movie he could watch at will—how they went fishing in a rowboat, and slept in a hayloft; and how they climbed the scaffolding surrounding the monastery and he nearly plunged to his death, only Ilya grabbed hold of his jacket just in the nick of time and saved him. And the horribly amusing story of the bee that he ate along with a piece of homemade jam pie, and how Ilya fished the pie right out of his mouth, and then plucked the stinger deftly from his lip.
Olga had other memories: of the vanishing frescoes of the icon painter Dionysius, the crumbling monastery, and the slow, somnolent beauty of the north, which, from that very first sunset, shimmering and pellucid, she recognized as her true home.
It was here, near Vologda, that she finally came to terms with her keen disappointment in her parents’ ideals, in the whole edifice of power and authority of the country she was born in, in the country itself, with its cruel and inhuman regulations and customs. Now she was overcome by a new and heart-wrenching love for this austere, impoverished north, where her father had been born. Her heart leapt to her throat when she watched the late-evening sun sink into the big lake, and saw how the crimson sky gradually gave way to silver, and how this silver spread over everything else, in turn—the fields, the water, the air. This greenish-silver hue was also a revelation of this journey, and it was Ilya who first noticed it, and spoke of it.
* * *<
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During these years the general ensconced himself in his workshop for good, leaving it only rarely. Olga’s mother was afraid of losing her position at the magazine, but no one tried to remove her: she was a Party-hack writer, a real bigwig.
When Kostya started school, they moved to the Moscow apartment and Antonina Naumovna began staying overnight at the dacha more and more often. The official automobile went back and forth twice a day, nearly every day—dropping her off and picking her up again.
When they had been together ten years, their marriage started to falter.
Ilya became nervous and importunate: his playful effervescence changed to gloominess. At the beginning of 1980 he announced to Olga that they would have to leave the country. They had been talking about it for a long time, but only in a perfunctory way. Suddenly, out of the blue, Ilya started treating it as a matter of grave urgency.
“I’ll request an invitation for the whole family. If you don’t want to come with me, we’ll have to get a divorce.”
“Of course I want to go with you. But think about it—Vova will never let Kostya leave, if only to spite me. When he turns eighteen it won’t be an issue any longer; we won’t need Vova’s permission.” Olga thought Ilya was being unreasonable and demanding. They hadn’t left ten years ago—what was the big hurry now?
Ilya insisted and kept trying to rush things along. Olga met with her ex-husband to discuss it. It was no go. Vova proved to be as intransigent as she had anticipated. It even surprised her how mule-headed he was. He flatly refused to let her have her way, and even gave her a piece of his mind.
Olga begged Ilya to wait another year. He was in a feverish haste: they had to leave; it was now or never. And he had reason to be nervous about his situation. Unpleasant rumors about him were making the rounds, and he was afraid Olga would get wind of them. One day, almost on the spur of the moment, he announced, without going into much detail, that if Olga couldn’t go with him because of Kostya, they would have to divorce immediately.
For Olga this was akin to a disaster—but a strange one, somehow unnecessary, or avoidable. It wasn’t at all clear why Ilya was so adamant about leaving all of a sudden. If they waited a year, Kostya could go with them. Many of their friends had already emigrated to all corners of the earth. There really wasn’t any hurry.
Finally, things broke down, and they filed for a divorce. Now a honeymoon began, only in reverse. The expectation of having to part ways—for one year? maybe two?—lent a bittersweet poignancy to their relations. Even Kostya was overcome by these tangled emotions. He had reached the age when he should have felt most alienated from his parents, but he clung to Ilya so stubbornly that he proved a constant threat to their solitude and emotional intimacy.
In these trying circumstances, their love reached such a fever pitch that their nocturnal passion destroyed the last boundaries between them—they made crazy vows to each other, oaths and promises so outlandish and unrealizable that they seemed to be fifteen years old rather than forty. They swore that no matter what obstacles arose, they would devote the rest of their lives to reuniting with each other.
The mechanism of departure was set in motion. The process was an unusually speedy one. Two weeks after submitting his documents, Ilya received permission to leave. He flew by the conventional route: through Vienna, then on to anywhere in the world. He had his sights set on America. A place far away.
His going-away party was held at the apartment of some friends. The general’s apartment in Moscow wasn’t suitable for any number of reasons.
The send-off was noisy, with peaks and valleys of emotion—sometimes it felt like a funeral, sometimes like a birthday party. In a way it was both.
At Sheremetyevo Airport, Ilya stood out in the crowd of people who were abandoning the country forever. They were nervous, sweaty, and burdened with children, the elderly, and piles of luggage. He wore a serene expression and carried no luggage. He had sent his collection of books ahead of him in a diplomatic mail pouch, arranged through a friend who worked at an embassy. The same friend had also sent the negatives from Ilya’s photo archive. Colonel Chibikov was unlikely to have been privy to this information.
Many facts remained obscure. Why, for example, had Chibikov, who was by then already a general, helped him to emigrate? What did he stand to gain by it? Was Ilya’s job at Radio Liberty a happy escape into freedom or a continuation of the ambiguous game he was mixed up in until the moment of his death?
It was unlikely that anyone would ever know.
Ilya receded into the black hole that yawned beyond the border guards. A camera with no film dangled from his neck—the film had been confiscated by the officials. A half-empty backpack was slung over his shoulder. In it was a change of underwear and an English grammar book, which he had been carrying around with him for two years.
During the night, after Ilya’s departure, Olga started bleeding profusely. She was taken to the hospital in an ambulance. The illness, which had in fact begun long before, had chosen this day to manifest itself.
The first year of Ilya’s absence was marked by feverish correspondence as well as bouts of fever. Olga lost her appetite, grew alarmingly thin, and had to force herself just to eat three spoonfuls of oatmeal a day. Her old friends rallied around her in sympathy. Antonina Naumovna also felt sorry for Olga, and the more she pitied her, the more she hated her former son-in-law.
Ilya had already made it to America by this time. Things were far worse there than he had imagined they would be. Moreover, the German to whom he had entrusted his collection of avant-garde literature, which he had begun amassing in his school years, was dragging his feet about sending it on to him. The value of the books, according to the auction catalogs, was far greater than Ilya had supposed.
Ilya wrote infrequently, but the letters were fascinating. Olga lived from one letter to the next. She inundated him with her missives, paying no heed to the vagaries of postal delivery: for every one he sent, she replied with ten.
A year later, Olga received a terrible blow. Some mutual friends of theirs informed her that Ilya had gotten married. She wrote him a wrathful letter. She got a tender and repentant letter in reply: yes, he had gotten married, the flesh is weak, his marriage was virtually fictitious, he wasn’t actually living with his wife, since she lived in Paris. And she, Olga, must understand—here in America things were just not working out. He had to try to relocate to Europe. Marrying a Russian-French woman would give him that opportunity. It was the only way out.
Then there was a little throwback to the past/glimpse of the future: it was a temporary detour, unavoidable, their happiness still lay ahead of them … and a gentle reproach: you could have left Kostya there for a year, and we would have come back for him …
Olga was consumed with jealousy: Who was this woman, what kind of woman was she, where had she come from? She found out her name from her friends. She had been born in Kiev, had married a Frenchman, lived many years in France, and was then widowed. She was obviously no longer young. That was the only information she could dig up. Olga decided to go to Kiev, where they had mutual acquaintances galore. Truthful by nature, she nevertheless started lying to her Kiev friends right and left, and they told her everything she wanted to know. She even managed to wheedle a photograph of the newlyweds out of one of the bride’s more gullible friends. The photograph showed a plump, middle-aged woman, her fleshy hand resting brazenly on the shoulder of a smiling Ilya. It had been taken at the Paris City Hall. This hand became the primary piece of documentary evidence in the case against him.
Olga carried out a full investigation and uncovered a plethora of details and facts. She returned home, reeling from the heaps of contradictory information, but certain that Ilya had deceived her and that the marriage was in no way fictitious.
When she got back to Moscow, she ended up in the hospital again. More hemorrhaging. The doctors removed a large part of her stomach, a measure that was necessary to save her life. But the main culpri
t, the biggest ulcer, was the colored photograph of the newlyweds, wrapped up in a plastic bag and tucked away in her cosmetic case. The misdeeds of her ex-husband were all she could talk about. When she came out of the anesthesia, the first thing she said to her friend Tamara, who was sitting next to her and taking care of her, was:
“Did you see the flowers in the picture? That bouquet was huge, wasn’t it?”
The doctors had taken out a part of her stomach, but they couldn’t remove the bleeding wound of her heart.
Olga expected the whole world to take her side in the conflict. Really there was only one side to take: a divorced man had gone away and married someone else at the other end of the earth. The promises, oaths, and vows of eternal love didn’t add up to a side in the conflict at all; they were just words …
In the meantime, Olga’s son, Kostya, was preparing to deal her another blow. He had fallen in love with a girl he had met in college, and they were going to live together for all eternity. The most improbable, and perhaps banal, part of this whole story is that Kostya and Lena, his first and only love, are still living in the general’s Moscow apartment today, with their already grown children.
Olga demanded sympathy and loyalty from Kostya, the person she felt closest to; he, in turn, stubbornly resisted. He didn’t want to sympathize with her, nor did he wish to take anyone’s side in the matter. He loved his mother, but he loved Ilya, too. He didn’t want to hear his mother’s constant reproaches of his stepfather. Olga was deeply offended by this. She grabbed a handful of fabric on the shoulder of his new black sweater, and hissed:
“From Ilya? It didn’t take much to buy you off.”
Ilya did send parcels addressed to Kostya from time to time. Besides the clothes for him, there were also things “for the house,” which were in fact meant for Olga. Olga fastidiously passed these things on to her mother—newfangled can openers, oilcloth for the table in highland plaids, and other cheap rubbish.
The Big Green Tent Page 15
