Beautiful Assassin (10 page)

I was just emerging from that awkward period of youth, when a girl magnifies her every flaw into some tragedy. Madame Rudneva, though, must have seen some spark in me, one I didn’t even know existed myself. She found some excuse to have me stay after school once. At first I thought I was in trouble, as I sometimes was with other teachers. But instead we just chatted, about poetry, about life, about
my
life.

“What do you want to be when you grow up, Tat’yana?” she asked me. It was the first time anyone had ever asked me such a question. The other teachers, my parents, I guess even I, all assumed I would be like any other girl, no better or worse. Work in a factory, get married, make meals, produce healthy children, in short, silently accept what life had selected for me.

I shrugged. “I like to read,” I told her.

“Reading is an avocation. It’s not a vocation,” she said to me. “What do you want to
do
with your life.”

I paused, then blurted out, “I would like to write poetry.”

“Poetry?” she said. I feared she’d said this with irony, but I couldn’t detect the slightest trace of sarcasm, as other teachers would have re
sponded to such a bold statement. My own mother, for instance, viewed my poetry writing as just a silly childhood hobby, like playing with dolls. Something that I would eventually grow out of.

I nodded to Madame Rudneva.

“May I see some of it sometime, Tat’yana?”

“I don’t know,” I replied shyly.

After school the next day the woman handed me a tattered copy of a poet I had never heard of.

“You have not read Akhmatova?” asked Madame Rudneva.

“No.”

“She’s our greatest living poet. Though her works have been banned by Old Whiskers,” she said, tossing her head toward Stalin’s portrait.

“Why do you call him that?” I asked.

“It’s what they call him in the camps.” She paused, then whispered cautiously, “I spent some years in one of his camps.”

“My God!” I cried, startled. “What did you do, Madame Rudneva?”

She let out with a sardonic sigh. “I wrote a letter in support of my fifteen-year-old cousin who had been arrested for making a joke about the Party. For this, I received five years’ hard labor.” She glanced again at the picture of Stalin, then said, “‘Old Whiskers’ is too nice a name for that filthy swine.” Madame Rudneva stared at me suspiciously, as if she only then realized she’d spoken out of turn and now didn’t know if she could trust me. In those days, one had to be cautious of what one said. Fear and treachery were everywhere. The walls themselves seemed to have ears.

“Don’t worry,” I reassured her. Looking over my own shoulder, I whispered, “My mother calls him a mongrel dog.”

We shared a conspiratorial smile at this, knowing then it was safe to talk openly.

“Listen,” said Madame Rudneva as she opened the slender volume and began to read:

“Lovely, isn’t it?”

I nodded.

“Here,” she said, handing me the book. “Just don’t let anybody see you carrying it about.”

I promised that I would be careful.

After that she would bring me other volumes to read, sometimes a frayed edition of a banned poet or a book smuggled into the country by an exiled writer living in Europe. I didn’t let anyone see them. Especially not my father who, though he appreciated poetry, liked only the older poets, not the subversive modern ones who wrote “decadent bourgeois drivel,” as he put it. Madame Rudneva encouraged me to show her some of my own poems, and while I had previously shared them with no one, I found myself letting her read them.

“These are very good, Tat’yana,” she told me.

“Just some scribblings,” I replied defensively.

“Nonsense. They need polish, of course. Nothing of beauty comes except with hard work. But they are good. They show real promise.”

“Do you really think so?”

“Yes, indeed. You have the seeds of poetry in your soul, Tat’yana.” Then she leaned close, as if the portrait of Old Whiskers might overhear her. “Yet I fear they will never bear fruit in this soulless country of ours.”

Never before had anyone spoken to me like this, so frankly about our country and its failings, or about my passion for writing. Until then, my poetry had appeared to me as little more than a youthful romantic notion I felt compelled to keep to myself, an oddity I would, as my mother maintained, grow out of. As I came to trust Madame Rudneva, I found myself opening up to her, staying after school to talk about all sorts of things—poetry and philosophy, politics and history. The revolution. The Party. The rights of women. Even about love. Unlike most of my other teachers, Madame Rudneva was not closed-minded, not provincial or dogmatic in her thinking, and unlike the rest of my teachers, she was not afraid to express herself, despite the very real danger such things might bring to one who was so outspoken. She had traveled widely, to Europe, studying in England, at Cambridge. She’d even been
to the United States, back in the twenties, before such travel was forbidden. She read Donne and Blake and Keats to me in English. She would spend afternoons teaching me to recite the words in English and then translating them for me. Once, she brought me a volume she’d purchased years before when she was in England, by the American poet Emily Dickinson.

“‘There is no frigate like a book,’” she would read from Dickinson, and have me recite it after her. “‘To take us lands away.’”

Slowly I began to pick up a little English, and with it a curiosity about America.

“What was it like?” I asked her once.

“In New York, the buildings are so tall the tops reach the clouds. And automobiles everywhere. Going this way and that. Zoom, zoom,” the woman said, waving her hands rapidly about, as if shooing away flies. “And there is more food lying in the gutters than is on the tables of the wealthy here.”

“No,” I replied in astonishment.

“It’s true.”

“What sort of clothing do the women wear?”

“They dress in very bad taste. Flappers, they are called. They dance like this.” At which point Madame Rudneva got up from behind her desk and demonstrated how the American women danced, kicking her legs up and moving her body wildly around the front of the classroom. “Come,” she said, inviting me to dance. I shook my head, never having danced before. But she insisted. “I shall show you.”

Madame Rudneva held my hand and spun me about in dizzying circles. After a while we both stopped and began laughing uncontrollably.

“Are they all as decadent as they say?” I asked.

“They are spoiled from such soft living,” she replied. “But the Americans are not so very different from us.”

“But they are capitalists.”

At this time I still believed in some of the things my father had taught me, and he said the Americans were the epitome of capitalist greed and corruption, a society doomed to the “garbage heap of history.”

“You mustn’t believe everything those fools tell you, Tat’yana. The
Party tries to fill everyone’s head with lies and deceptions. Because the truth would make everyone angry. And when some brave few try to tell the truth, the government uses fear to shut them up.”

“My father says the Party exists only to carry out the will of the people.”

“Huh.” She laughed. “I once believed heart and soul in the revolution. I was young when we overthrew the czar, just a little older than you. I thought we could change the world. But those in charge wanted to change things only for their own betterment.”

“Did you like America?” I asked.

“In some ways very much. There you are free to do many things we could not even imagine here. You can read whatever you want and write what’s in your heart. People aren’t afraid to say what they think. And American women aren’t pigeonholed into this or that category. They can be anything. Do anything.”

“Really?”

“Yes. You would like it there, I think.”

“If you liked it so much in America, did you ever think of…” I asked, my voice trailing warily off, as we’d been trained when speaking of forbidden topics.

“Defecting?” replied Madame Rudneva. “I did actually. I gave it serious consideration. But this is my home. It’s my country as much as it is those fools’ who run things. Besides, there was the small matter of a man back here.” She smiled at this, her thoughts drifting off for a moment. “I was young and in love. He lived here and I thought I would die if we were not together.”

“May I ask what happened?”

“Like you he was a writer. A journalist. He wrote the truth, and when they told him to stop and he refused, they came and took him away. I never heard from him again. It broke my heart. I have had many lovers, but he was the only man I ever truly loved.”

She let her gaze fall to the floor. I didn’t know what to say. Here was a teacher sharing her intimate personal life with me, as if I were a friend, an equal.

“I’m sorry,” I offered finally.

“I consider myself fortunate to have been in love with someone of such courage,” she explained. “Have you ever been in love, Tat’yana?”

“Me?” I said, shaking my head.

“A pretty girl like you must have many admirers.”

“Hardly,” I replied. “I don’t think boys are much interested in me, Madame Rudneva. They call me Gypsy because of my dark hair.”

“You have lovely hair.”

I shrugged.

“They are imbeciles!” she said, laughing. “But that will soon change. You are a beautiful young woman, Tat’yana. Someday you will have lots of men interested in you. And you will meet a handsome young man and you will fall in love just as I did.”

“I doubt that.”

“Believe me, you will. Do you know what Tsvetaeva wrote about love?” Of course, at the time I had never even heard of such a poet. “‘Ah! is the heart that bursts with rapture.’”

Secretly, I hoped someday my own heart would burst with such rapture. You see, despite my competitive nature, my seeming disdain for boys and for matters of the heart, I hoped that I would someday fall in love, that I would meet a man who would stir the sort of passion in me that only my poetry or my shooting did now. I pictured someone tall with broad shoulders and an easy smile, a man who would not begrudge my wanting to write poetry, to think independently, who would accept me as I was and not want to make me into some coarse and dull babushka. As I began to devour Akhmatova as one would an exotic and heady fruit whose sweet nectar made the throat clutch with passion, I would see in her poems my own imagined lover. Someone whose touch was gentle and tender, who wasn’t afraid to love fully and completely, even dangerously. Of course, life never works out as one imagines. Sometimes I think our dreams are there only to make us taste the bitter regret of how far short we fall from them.

After I graduated secondary school, I took a job for a while at an arsenal factory. I worked a lathe, making artillery shells, as unpoetic an occupation as there is. I recall coming home one evening, and over dinner my father casually telling me that my former teacher Madame Rudneva
had been arrested. “Arrested!” I cried. Despite knowing the danger she’d always put herself in by her candor, I was shocked. I begged my father to use his influence, to try to find out where she’d been sent, to see what he could do on her behalf. But he told me that that was impossible, that he wouldn’t put himself or his family in je0pardy for such a person. That night I remember crying myself to sleep.

When I grew bored with factory work, I decided to go to the university, where I studied Russian history and literature. I also shot competitively in the Osoviakhim, even winning many medals for my shooting, including being the best marksman in the entire Ukraine. In my spare time I read whatever I could get my hands on. A group of us shared books smuggled in from the West, rough, handwritten translations of T. S. Eliot and Walt Whitman and D. H. Lawrence, as well as banned volumes of our own countrymen, Pilnyak and Pasternak, and the great soul herself, Akhmatova. I also continued to write my own poetry. I showed it among my friends and even managed to publish some poems in small underground newspapers and in anonymous samizdat literary journals circulated in manuscript and read by a handful of like-minded people. Though, of course, you had to be extremely careful about what you wrote and with whom you associated. The editor of
The Workers’ Voice,
which published one of my poems, had his apartment broken into by the secret police. His mimeograph machine and typewriter were smashed to pieces. Like Madame Rudneva’s lover, though, he stubbornly refused to take the hint and continued to publish articles and poems against the government until finally he was arrested.

Still, it was good to feel a part of something important, a community of kindred spirits who wanted to think and speak and write freely. My father and I grew more and more distant, divided politically as well as emotionally. While I still deeply loved my country, believed in what the revolution had promised and the aspirations of the people, I had grown discouraged, even angry, with the Party, which I came to see as oppressive as any czar. My father and I began to argue, sometimes so heatedly that my mother would have to intervene. He thought I was
associating with a decadent crowd, and that if I wasn’t careful I would find myself like Madame Rudneva, which would reflect badly on him and my mother. I didn’t want to hurt them, so I moved out and got a room near the university. I supported myself by working nights in the factory and going to school during the day. I gravitated toward a small circle of bohemian friends. We wore outlandish clothing and smoked and frequented a café down near the river where students and intellectuals and artists gathered. I struck a pose that suited me, fostered a romantic notion of myself as a poet. I liked to believe I’d be the next Akhmatova. That I’d write fearless and daring poems that would touch the heart, that would make people stand up and take notice. Like her, I would write the truth no matter the cost. Like her, I would live a life filled with intensity. I would live dangerously, love passionately. I was young and foolish and thought that one could control one’s destiny.