After Love (4 page)

When an official from the militia reported the arrest of a suspect, no one in the city believed they had got the right man. Women were still refusing to walk alone at night. Many carried bottles of vinegar or packets of hot peppers or chillies in their bags, if they had to be out.

By the time Anna and I left the Metro station it was nearly midnight. But nothing happened to us that night. We waited together for a bus which arrived right on time and took us safely to the last stop, a short walk from the apartments where she lived. We climbed the dark stairs to the second floor and before unlocking the door she showed me the doorbell. ‘To call me you have to ring the bell twice,' she instructed. She entered first to check if there was anyone up, then whispered for me to come in.

Her room had a big window facing north, looking out over a little park with two swings, a fountain and a large oak tree.

We were both tired and slightly embarrassed. I know she would have let me into her bed if I had asked. But I didn't. I didn't want to make the first move.

I was glad that she didn't draw the curtains across the window. Lying on my mattress I could see the enormous oak nodding its long branch like an elephant taking a stroll.

Neither of us could sleep. Soon Anna began to sing, even though she knew that the retired nurse who slept in the adjoining room would complain in the morning. I turned on my side to look at her, then got up to sit with my back against the wall. She continued to sing her song. When she had finished I asked for more. She sang four songs, five. I came up close to her and sat down beside her. ‘I'm tired,' she finally said. ‘Thank you,' I said and kissed her hand.

Then I returned to my mattress and fell asleep at once. The next I knew I was awake and she was standing beside me holding a blanket. ‘I knew you wouldn't ask,' she said and pushed me over to make room for herself on the mattress. She turned her body away from me and I put my arm around her. I slept again, inhaling her with every breath.

‘I'm filled to the brim with you,' I wanted to tell her first thing in the morning. But as usual it was she who broke the silence. ‘I saw you curled up on that mattress with the blanket lying on the floor and the pillow between your legs. “He must be cold,” I said to myself, and came to you.'

‘I love you,' I said.

‘I know,' she replied.

Tonya, My Agitprop Mama

Anna

Vasu told me that he knew very little about his mother. Just like me.

There is a drawing in one of the scrapbooks I kept as a child. In the right-hand corner is my name and underneath the name of my school and the date. I called the drawing
My Mama
. The woman stands near a window looking out; her face is turned, strangely, away from the viewer. Outside is a small round hill covered in snow, bright in the sunlight. The drawing is in just four colours.

I was five when I drew it. Papa was surprised by my view but for Aunty Olga the reason was obvious. ‘You were too young to know her face,' she said. She was right. Our family album did contain a few photos of my mother but they didn't mean much to me. Her presence in them was largely formal, as was her absence in my real life. I had been told that she died in an accident. This was thought enough for me to know.

One night in August, a few months before my sixteenth birthday, I took three large family albums to my room and spent hours looking at them. I wasn't sure why.
Just curious
, I would have told anyone who asked, but it wasn't as straightforward as that.

I was disappointed that the albums contained only a handful of pictures of my mother. A few days later Aunty Olga showed me an old suitcase packed with bundles of loose photos. I pulled them out but most of them were so yellow with age it was impossible to see anything clearly in them.

I did, however, find photos that I liked. I put them aside to look at again. Papa knew a professional photographer who worked with the newspaper
Izvestia
. He made me some large prints. The process, Papa explained to me, wasn't simple: the photographer had first obtained a contact negative of the photos on an emulsion plate and then used this to print the enlargements, carefully controlling the exposure time.

One evening after dinner I asked Papa and Aunty Olga to tell me more about these four. Aunty Olga couldn't tell me much. Papa, on the other hand, seemed to remember everything about them.

Photo 1: Winter, 1948, Kuntsevo. My mother, Tonya, was then twenty-seven. This photo was taken a day after her birthday and I can't see her face clearly. That day she wore a dark olive-green coat and matching hat. It had snowed for two days, Papa told me. One of his friends had a
dacha
and had invited them to spend a few days skiing. The photo was taken late in the afternoon when the snow had stopped falling and the sky was clear, revealing a sun weak as the light of a torch. My mother is standing shadowed, a dark figure silhouetted against the endless white of the snow.

Photo 2: Autumn, 1949, Tsvetnoi Boulevard. My mother is sitting on a bench, smiling and wearing a pale blouse and a long striped skirt under a light autumn coat, unbuttoned. She holds an ice-cream in her right hand. Papa says that everyone then was suffering from the severe shortage of food. What they received on the ration card was meagre, although his wartime injury meant that he got a bit more than others. But even then one could go to Gorky Street and get cones and cups of delicious ice-cream. In the photo the light is bright, with leaves, mostly maple, scattered across the bench, the grass and the gravel path. My mother's hair is gathered into a ponytail and tied with a ribbon. I still can't see her face clearly.

Photo 3: Summer, 1950, Soboleva. My mother was born in this village, about fifty kilometres south of Leningrad, near a stream that froze in winter. She stands near the gate of a small wooden cottage, her right arm resting on it, her left touching her stomach. She is wearing a spotted summer dress with thin straps. Her hair has grown and is straight and smooth. She seems to have put on weight, but her arms are thin, and her skin appears silky soft. She doesn't look like a village girl. Was she? ‘No,' Papa says, ‘she was an actor working in agitprop.' Under her left hand I spot a bulge. So is she pregnant? ‘Is she?' I ask Papa. When he nods, I say: ‘So that's me in her belly?' ‘Yes, you silly girl,' he replies.

Photo 4: Winter, 1949, A Studio on Kuznetsky Most, Moscow. At last I can see her face clearly. She is so beautiful. Her face is small and a perfect oval. Her hair is cut short and curled. She is wearing lipstick and I see that her lower lip is sensuously fleshy. Her nose turns up slightly. But Papa's face lights up when he talks about her eyes. They were large and brown below neatly-curved eyebrows, he says. She is wearing a blouse with a frilled collar, short sleeves and a square neckline. Aunty Olga remarks that she looked very like Tatiana Samoilova, the actress who not only played the lead of a sexy, faithless woman in
The Cranes are Flying
but also won the prized role of Anna Karenina in the 1967 film. Aunty Olga is right. So why I am so plain and ugly? The only feature we share is our nose. ‘Is she really my mother?' I ask. ‘Of course,' Papa laughs.

I don't believe him.

One evening after I returned home from my cello lesson, Aunty Olga called me into her room to show me what she had found. From an old suitcase she took a light cotton dress. I knew at once what it was: the summer dress my pregnant mother had worn in the photo. Instinctively I tried to find out if it still smelt of her. Of course it didn't because it had been washed and dried and ironed since she had worn it.

I went into my room, put on the dress and looked into the mirror. ‘A bit big for me, don't you think?' I asked, turning to Aunty Olga. She agreed. The dress was loose not only because I was fifteen but also because Tonya had worn it during her pregnancy.

It took me a few months to ask Aunty Olga if it were true that my mother had been killed in an accident. I surprised myself. Until then I had been content to believe what I had been told. But in the previous few months a feeling of desolation mixed with a faint heartache, strangely more soothing than painful, had begun to grow inside me. Perhaps the photos of my mother were now starting to speak to me. My longing to touch and hug the woman in the photo had become incredibly real and urgent. I suppose it wasn't a good idea to sleep the whole night in the dress. I should have put it straight back in the suitcase.

Early one morning Aunty Olga asked me to go into the city with her. We took the red Sokolniki Metro, then walked along Teatralny Lane for a few minutes, passing on the way the Malai Theatre. At Dzherzhinsky Square we turned right and crossed the street to reach the imposing Polytechnical Museum building. On the street near the bus stop, Aunty Olga stopped to indicate a spot near a lamppost. ‘Right here Anna, my darling, Tonya was hit by a truck.'

There was hardly any traffic on the street and the bus stop was deserted except for an old woman who sat with a white cat on her lap, patiently waiting.

‘I don't feel well,' Aunty Olga said. She asked me to run to the café across the street and get her a glass of water. When I returned I found her sitting on the kerb leaning against the lamppost. I gave her the water, patted her arm and sat down with her. The old woman's white cat looked at us and purred. ‘Shush,' her mistress said, slapping her cat.

After a while we got up, went across to the museum and found a bench to sit on. Gradually the traffic on the streets increased, as did the people around us. Buses came, stopped and drove away as if nothing extraordinary had ever happened here. A short plump women wearing a white apron arrived with her vending machine and a small group formed around her. She was selling
pirozhki
, talking loudly the whole time. Another woman, almost a copy of the first, came to sell sweet white coffee in small paper cups.

I asked Aunty Olga if she wanted some refreshing coffee. She suggested we wait for the ice-cream woman, who appeared on cue, as if she had been waiting for Aunty Olga's command. We bought two cones of chocolate ice-cream and sat down again on the bench. A young man with a tired face spread a tarpaulin on the ground a few metres away and began laying out books. ‘It's going to be a wonderful day,' he muttered.

It was indeed turning into a beautiful summer day, with not a scrap of cloud in the sky and the light so bright it would soon hurt our eyes. Suddenly an image flashed before me: my mother standing at the gate in the dress, her hand resting on her swollen belly, caressing it.

Aunty Olga began to whisper as if talking to herself. ‘One late afternoon in November, Tonya came out of the Malai Theatre after watching a rehearsal of a play in which one of her friends had a small part. She walked along the lane, the same one we came along, turned right and stepped into the street to cross to the Polytechnical Museum. She was going to a talk by one of our leading scientists on the origins of life. She was already in the middle of the road when she saw the bus speeding towards her. She ran to avoid it but failed to see an army truck coming from the other direction. It was snowing, the road was slippery and it was hard to see. The young truck driver slammed on the brakes and his vehicle slid, lifted Tonya off the ground and hurled her against the lamppost near the bus stop. She died at once, said the young militiaman who came to tell us what had happened.'

‘Where was I?' I asked

‘With me at home,' replied Aunty Olga.

‘And Papa?'

‘In Siberia.'

‘You didn't tell him?'

‘Of course I wanted to, but I couldn't. I didn't know where he was. It took time. Everything took time then. You had to wait, be patient and hope against all hope. Hope was the reason, the only consolation to live, to survive—'

At home that afternoon, we made a pot of tea and sat in the kitchen sipping it, still talking in low voices. Even at home it seemed inappropriate to talk loudly, as if mere words would shatter the memory, scattering slivers and shards everywhere.

After a while, Aunty Olga went and got a small leather bag from which she took a piece of paper, Tonya's death certificate, and a short clipping from the
Trud
newspaper, 28 November 1952. I read the certificate and the cutting carefully and noted the date in my diary.

My mother had been cremated the following day and her ashes scattered in the stream near the cottage in Soboleva.

‘
Vot i vsyo
(That's all). What else is there to say?' Aunty Olga got up and went to her room. She didn't come out until the following morning.

The following week when Papa returned from his field trip, he gave me two suitcases full of my mother's things. I put them under my bed, after I took out a few keepsakes: a necklace, an Uzbek scarf, the remains of a lipstick, a hand-mirror and a songbook.