After Love (24 page)

‘That was Rudka,' she said and smiled. She told me that in less than an hour we would cross the Polish border and stop at Brest. There the wheels would be changed and guards would come to inspect my documents and luggage.

Since I had been in Moscow, everything in the political landscape of Eastern Europe had changed. The Berlin Wall had fallen; Poland was ruled by Solidarity; Vaclav Havel was President in Prague; in Romania Ceausescu had been deposed, captured and executed; and even in Bulgaria, the Communists had fallen. In the Soviet Union itself both
glasnost
and
perestroika
had fractured the hitherto monolithic structure of the state and the Party, which was rapidly losing ground. People like Shurik were beginning to question its hegemony. Strangely Vladimir seemed to have remained untouched by the events. His silence intrigued me. I remembered the little postcard he had sent me in Canada, on which he had scribbled a few lines from Pushkin's
Boris Godunov. ‘Smutnoe vremya
(the time of troubles) have arrived,' he had noted.

The casual way in which my documents were checked surprised me. My luggage wasn't examined at all, and my passport and visa generated only a friendly discussion.

‘An Indian living in Canada, is that so?' they asked.

‘I teach a semester in Canada each year.' They weren't interested in my teaching job or qualifications but one of them noticed that I was carrying some ice-hockey magazines and posters, which I had brought for Yasya. The young man was a keen player himself and a big fan of Maltsev, the striker of the Dynamo Moscow team. I gave him a poster.

The train arrived at Belorussky Station around nine in the morning. I gathered my bags, stepped down and automatically looked over at the opposite platform. That was where the bench had been where, when Aunty Olga, Katya and Tamrico had come to see us off at the station, Aunty Olga had sat because she had not been feeling well.

I took a few steps towards the bench that no longer existed, then stopped. I didn't want the absent bench to resurrect the face I had so desperately tried to remember and then forget a few hours before. There was no need, I reminded myself.

As I left the station I turned back to look at the big clock hanging on the wall above the main portico. Unlike the day of our departure, it was ticking.

‘Quarter past nine,' I murmured and looked at my watch, which was still showing Berlin time.

It took me a while to find a cab. I was surprised that the square in front of the station, which used to be so busy, was almost empty.

When I finally did find a cab, I started chatting with the driver, who was from Georgia. Then as we turned into Gorky Street we were suddenly among a column of tanks and armed personnel carriers loaded with soldiers.

‘What's happening?' I asked the driver.

‘A military coup,' he said.

When Katya opened the door and saw me outside, her face expressed no surprise. Just a faint smile followed by a soft
hello
and a kiss.

‘Welcome,' she said. ‘You can't imagine how glad I am to see you. Vladimir is waiting for you.' She tried to smile again but gave up and then exhausted by the effort to control her emotions, she slumped on the stool near the door and began to sob.

‘I am sorry,' she said after a few minutes.

‘He is in the library. Please take off your coat, get rid of those awful shoes and let me see if I can find you a pair of warm slippers.'

Once they were found, I was ushered into the kitchen. Soon the kettle was boiled, a fresh pot of tea brewed, and a bowl filled with chocolates and lollies. I took a sip and thanked her for the lovely hot tea.

She swept breadcrumbs off the tablecloth, straightened it and said: ‘I didn't know if my letter would reach you in time. I'm so glad that you've come. You must be tired and hungry. Let me do you a quick omelette.'

I reassured her that I wasn't at all hungry.

‘You haven't changed much. The same delightful face and the same hesitant smile,' she said.

‘You haven't changed much either,' I wanted to say, but couldn't because she had in fact changed quite a lot: grown old, put on weight. Most painful of all was the change in the colour of her skin. I recalled the wonderful smoothness of what Tamrico often used to call her
luminous skin
. Now she looked tired and the blankness in her eyes was frightening.

She noticed my silence. ‘Don't tell me that I look fine too,' she said. Not waiting for my response, she continued: ‘Because I don't.'

She glanced out the window and then turned back to me.

‘You know, the most painful thing in life is the feeling that you can't ever experience the pain suffered by those you love, as they themselves experience it. Any pain you endure is principally your own, and try as you may, the thought always plagues you that your pain is not enough, just not of the same measure. And that's when you begin to question your integrity, your honesty and most of all your love.'

She held her mug of tea in both hands, warming them without drinking. After a short pause, she went on: ‘I told you he's in the library, behind the closed door. I'll take you in, but I want to be sure that you're ready for him. Do you still remember his face? It's completely changed.'

‘I'm not sure if I do remember,' I wanted to say. Instead I took from my bag the sketch I had made of Vladimir in the train. I repeated for her Mayakovsky's little poem about the pearly spit-lets in the sky and how much I admired the way Vladimir used to read it aloud.

‘I can still remember the words,' I said. ‘And now I know why.' She took my sketch, looked intently at it, smiled wanly and then turned away.

Slowly she rose and fetched from the bedroom an album containing photos of Vladimir, one for each month of the preceding three years. I was stunned by the indifference with which each picture recorded his rapid decline.

Five years before, she told me, he had been diagnosed HIV-positive. This had gradually developed into full-blown AIDS. She had been unable to organise proper medicines or treatment and no doctor or nurse had been willing to look after him. He had rapidly lost weight, and when the previous year he had caught pneumonia, he had deteriorated even faster. A few months ago he had completely lost his voice. Now he communicated in indecipherable whispers, croaks and desperate cries.

‘He's going down rapidly,' Katya said. ‘Soon he'll be gone. We don't want ever to leave him alone so we take turns sitting with him, beside his bed. Tamrico is there now. But if you want to you can go in and see him.'

Tamrico already knew I had arrived. She greeted me with a silent hug and then left the room.

On the bed, white as any stretch of fresh snow, was Vladimir. His head, bald and small, resting on two pillows, seemed tiny as a little boy's. His eyes were shut and his arms lay at his side, hands and fingers absolutely still, legs straight and in the place of feet just a small hump. Only his head and the shape of his feet showed that there was indeed someone lying under the sheet. Without them there were only folds.

‘He's ready to dissolve into thin light air,' I thought. The only movement was the occasional quiver of his body. The only sound was a slow and steady drip into his arm.

The bed was almost in the middle of the room. Beside it stood a chair and a little table. There was a tall lamp in the corner illuminating half the room. On one wall hung a framed copy of Kiprenksy's portrait of Pushkin, and on the other, a large framed poster of Chagall's
White Crucifixion
.

As I sat with him, I found that Vladimir slept most of the time, only occasionally interrupted by the few words Katya whispered in his ear. During the day sunlight flooded the room from the window near Pushkin's portrait, and in the evening the soft light of dusk entered from a smaller window in the opposite wall. Even at night the curtains were never drawn.

‘He likes natural light and fresh air,' Katya explained.

Now Katya went up to Vladimir, leaned down and murmured something in his ear. After a few seconds his eyes opened, his face turned in my direction and he smiled, and for a tiny moment I caught a glimpse of the face I had dreamed in the train.

I sat down, pulling the chair close to the bed, taking his hand and pressing it gently. There was little response. As I was about to withdraw it I felt a slight tightening of his grip and left it there. After a while his grip relaxed, reassured that my touch was real and that I wouldn't desert him. Thought, I felt, was still living in his body and the disposition to feel joy and pleasure, and to give and receive them, hadn't departed. I felt his grip tightening again and his arm moved slightly. I gazed into his face and found his eyes open, trying to reach me, and his lips quivering. Katya had crept in again and was indicating that Vladimir was trying to say something to me.

I leaned forward and heard the words: ‘Berlin … Rosa Luxemburg Platz Station …'

Vladimir was trying hard to speak but couldn't get out any more words.

‘Why Berlin?' I wanted to ask. But Katya had turned away, distressed by his desperate attempts to speak. I patted his hand, letting him know that I had heard him.

‘This coup won't succeed.' Shurik was certain of it.

‘Who knows?' Tamrico wasn't so sure.

‘The army can be so ruthless.' Katya was frightened.

‘But most of them are conscripts: young, fresh and apprehensive. They won't open fire on unarmed people.'

Shurik was adamant. ‘Civil war scares everyone.'

‘It didn't eighty years ago,' I said.

‘Then it was different. It was class war,' he said. ‘Brother attacked brother. Now there are no classes, just poor and not-so-poor people.'

In the sitting room the television was left turned on at a low, hardly audible volume. Normal programmes had been suspended, replaced by ballets, operas and concerts.

At the end of the corridor, Yasya's room was a mess. ‘Young boys and girls keep coming and going, excited about what's going on in the streets,' Katya told me. The kitchen was by far the noisiest room, with the radio on constantly. Every snippet of information was carefully analysed.

Yasya and his friends went out to the barricades near the White House, the Parliament building. They kept us informed about the events by calling us from a nearby hotel where one of Yasya's friend worked as an accountant.

Shurik began to look worried. He had been to the White House several times, inspected the scene around Manezhnaya Square and talked to the soldiers in the tanks lined up ominously along Kalininsky Prospect. He had contacts in the KGB who could give him news from inside. What gave him confidence about the resistance was that the security forces, the army and the KGB were divided. Most soldiers hated the KGB, and it contained warring factions.

The most dangerous threat, he said, came from the Alpha Group of the KGB, a special unit of crack commandos. They had been involved in the January 1991 assault on a Lithuanian television station in Vilnius, resulting in at least fourteen civilians being killed. He had a friend who knew one of these commandos and who was desperately trying to reach him to discover their intentions.

Yasya told us that President Yeltsin had finally emerged from the White House, mounted a tank and given a rousing speech. He was accompanied by a retired colonel, which would have unsettled some of the soldiers. Yeltsin shook hands with one of them and joked: ‘I hope you aren't going to shoot your President, young man.'

Yasya had been standing right next to the tank and had heard everything perfectly. ‘Yeltsin is brave, isn't he?' a woman in the crowd had said to her companion. ‘He's brave because he's drunk,' her companion had laughed, ‘but only he, the
Sibiryak
(Siberian), can save us.'

‘He comes from Sverdlovsk,' shouted someone else. ‘But does it matter?'

Yasya told them that he had pulled out a packet of gum from his pocket and offered it to a young soldier. ‘Not allowed,' the soldier had told him, angrily. An old man standing nearby encouraged the soldier, but he wouldn't yield, even though he was obviously hungry. Then a woman offered chocolate bars to other soldiers. One of them took a couple and hid them in his pocket.