The Accidental Anarchist (39 page)

Sweating guiltily, I asked, “Shall I tell him to slow down?”

“If you wish. But it might make us late getting back to the theatre.”

“Then shall I tell him to go faster?”

“Whatever you think is best.”

This left me puzzled. Madame was not normally in the habit of leaving such decisions to anyone else. “Won’t you mind being late?”

She smiled at my earnestness. “It’s an old play. I’ve seen it twice before.”

“Then do you really want to see it again?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

Somewhat alarmed by her strangely docile manner, I ordered the coachman to head back toward the city. The
troika
flew and bounced over the uneven ground, and Madame and I struggled not to be pitched out of our seats. Now and then, our faces nearly collided, but she did not flinch. Her scent burned in my nostrils and I tried not to sneeze. Soon, I had nowhere left to retreat, although it was possible that I didn’t try hard enough. I felt horridly disloyal to Vasya. But was it my fault that Madame and I were late for the theater?

Snowflakes pounded like fists against our windows, but not half as loud as my thundering heart. To distract myself from wrongful thoughts, I tried to focus on what Madame was saying. But while her lips moved, her words hung mutely in the frozen air, waiting for the fire in my ears to melt them. Not for the first time, I reminded myself that I was a guest in her home, dependent for my very life on both her and her husband’s good will.

At the theater, the performance had long been under way. Refusing to check our expensive coats, we squeezed into our seats. I settled back and tried to make some sense of what was happening on stage. But there were so many characters coming in and out, each with his own terrible story, that I found the plot impossible to follow. I was also distracted by the scenery, which was not the normal country-squire’s drawing room that I had previous seen in plays, but a more familiar-looking, ill-kept shelter for the homeless.

I whispered to Madame that, thanks to her husband’s generosity, the shelter in Irkutsk was in far better condition than that depicted on stage. And in my opinion it attracted a somewhat classier clientele.

“Yes,” she said with a strangely bitter smile. “My husband is a generous man.”

Moments later, she determined that she had seen enough.

As the
troika
plowed homeward, Madame suddenly dug her nails into my wrist. Having thus attracted my attention, she declared that she did not love her husband.

Had my eyes been open, I suppose this revelation would not have come as a great shock. But my ignorance of married life was such that all I could think of was to suggest we had probably both had too much to drink at the theater. In fact, I guaranteed that, by morning, we would both have forgotten this whole conversation.

Her eyes blinked, and tears glistened down her marble cheeks. Bewildered, I asked if I had said something to give offense. She shook her head so vehemently that one of her tears splashed my nose.

That night, although my head lay on my pillow as heavily as a cannonball, I did not close an eye. The heat of Madame’s breath near my cheek had singed my skin. Through sheer, unforgivable negligence, I had fallen in love with someone forbidden to me. From that moment on, every hour I spent in that unhappy house would be a torment, as much for her as for me.

A servant’s knock summoned us to an early breakfast with our hosts. Numb with apprehension, I set my feet on the icy floor and struggled to pull on my trousers. Pyavka, following me down the stairs, humorously noted that I walked like a condemned man.

The Divanovskys had nearly finished their meal. Both were reading the newspaper. Vasya looked up and asked whether I had enjoyed the previous night’s performance. One glance at Madame’s face alerted me to be on my guard.

I told him truthfully that I was so charmed to have an escort like Madame that I hardly paid attention to the action on stage.

Later that morning, Madame and I had a moment alone. She told me how, as a girl, she had been wildly in love with a poor student. But her parents would not hear of the match, and the student had run off in despair to America. She never heard from him again, and could only assume that he was dead. Then, at a cousin’s wedding in Kiev, not yet recovered from her broken heart, she met the dashing young Divanovsky, fresh out of the Army, and was swept off her feet.  “But the moment I stood under the canopy, I knew I had made a bitter mistake.” And, to this day, not a night had passed that she did not mourn the ghost of the boy she had loved.

When I first appeared in her husband’s office, looking barely human, she had almost fainted because, for a flicker of a moment, she thought it was he, the ghost, the
dybbuk
, of her beloved returned to claim her.

I reminded her that I knew her husband long before she did and had always found him to be a kind and honorable man.

“Oh, yes, he is a kind man. Kind to all the beautiful women.”

“Madame, there are none more beautiful than you.”

“And what good is a silver cup if it is filled with tears? Or my beauty, my money, when it cannot give me a child? If I had that, at least, my life would have some purpose.”

“You have only been married for three years. Surely it’s too soon to give up hope.”

She shook her head with finality. “We have both been to doctors, specialists as far away as Vienna. I am capable of having a child, but he is not.”

I squirmed at being burdened with such intimate details, and felt relieved when she looked at the clock and said she had to go out.

Wonderful news! Our passports were finally ready. My new documents, cunningly aged and faded, were in the name of “Yakov Marmeladov.” My only small objection was that the paper did not appear to be of sufficiently poor quality to pass as “authentic.”

Pyavka, though, was greatly displeased with his new surname, Duda. When I heard what name had been chosen for him, I laughed uncontrollably. “It’s a perfect name,” I said.

Pyavka shook a finger at me. “You put him up to it.” I had not. I didn’t know how the passport forger had come up with either of our names, though one had to appreciate the irony that the new surname chosen for Pyavka meant “one who makes a lot of noise.”

“Why didn’t they have the courtesy to ask me what I wanted to be called?”

Out of patience with Pyavka’s delicate feelings, I told him that he was welcome to order a new set of papers with a more attractive name, but that I was taking the first train back to Poland.

At dinner, Vasya announced that from that night until I left, he would stay home to make up for all the days he had shamefully neglected his old comrade. I felt relieved to know that he would be present as a chaperone, whether he knew it or not.

That night, he and I played cards, while Madame sat mutely in a corner, embroidering. I could tell that Vasya’s mind was elsewhere. Near midnight, he threw down his hand and declared that he was going to bed.

Pyavka went to sleep early, again, complaining of various aches in his body, but refusing to let us call a doctor.

Left flagrantly alone with Madame, I struggled not to offend her by yawning. Long minutes passed, with neither of saying a word. At long last, she was ready to say good night. I waited until I heard the click of the key in her bedroom door, and then went up to my room. Pyavka was asleep, his face covered by a three-week-old newspaper from Warsaw. As I undressed, I realize I had left my gold watch, a farewell gift from Vasya, in the card room.

In my nightshirt, I raced down the stairs. A chill gripped my heart when I saw that the watch was gone.

I started to climb back up to my room to check my pockets once more. Halfway up the stairs, I encountered Madame. With a lit candle in her hand, and in a nightdress as filmy as a spider’s web, she descended in ghost-like silence, stopping on the step above me.

We stared at each other in silence. Her eyes haggard with reproach, she handed me the watch while I stood motionless, shivering in my half-unbuttoned shirt.

Simply to break the endless silence between us, I was about to ask her what was wrong when Madame said, “Are you my friend?”

I found the question astonishing, and could only mutter, “Of course.”

“There is a favor I want to ask you, but I fear you will say ‘no.’”

“I promise you, I will not.”

She looked suddenly aged and weary. “I want you to give me a child.”

I felt myself being drawn into quicksand. It took me some moments to recover my balance. Then, in as neutral a tone as I could manage, I said, “Dearest Madame, do you know what would happen? I would fall hopelessly in love with you, and. . .”

“Why ‘hopelessly’?”

The words in my head tripped over each other before I was finally able to extract, “And as for your faithful and devoted husband, neither of us would be able to look him in the eye.”

“Faithful?” she echoed with a bitter laugh. “Where do you think he stays until three o’clock in the morning? In his office, checking the books?”

“I don’t know what your husband does at night, but I have known him long enough to be convinced that he is an honorable man. And, as much I feel drawn to you, I will not violate his trust.”

Her face quivered. Anger, irony, self-pity? I was too confused to judge. “I have told you my husband is not capable of fathering a child. But the truth is more painful than that. He refuses to have relations with me. There is something about me that repels him.” She wiped her cheek. “And now I have made a fool of myself with the only man I respect.”

I tried to interrupt. “Dear lady, not at all.”

“But rather than be doomed never to experience motherhood, I swear I will divorce my husband and marry someone else.”

“I plead with you not to even think of doing that.”

“Then the matter is in your hands.”

“I don’t understand.”

She lowered herself until we were on the same step. “If you give me a child, I promise you, I will go on living with my husband. With love or without. For the sake of our child. You would be responsible for saving your friend’s marriage. What greater act of friendship could there be than that?”

As she spoke, her perfume seemed to wrap its arms around me and draw me closer. I struggled to direct my eyes away from her translucent nightdress  My resolution melted. I was ready to do whatever she asked.

Then a curious thing happened. The image of my father rushed through my brain. And something that I had not believed possible for a normal man happened. All desire suddenly drained out of me.

Madame’s voice was dry as tinder as she asked, “Promise me you will at least think about it? Until tomorrow?”

I agreed, wordlessly, and with the most intense discomfort. Feeling as though I had already betrayed my friend, I went up to my room.

Pyavka was still awake. Being no fool, he saw at once that something had been going on. I suppose he expected me to gossip about it, as men are apt to do. But I shut off the light and told him to go to sleep.

In the middle of breakfast, while Pyavka slurped his sugared coffee and Madame and I strained to avoid each other’s glance, Vasya was called to the telephone.

He came back looking distracted, if not evasive. I looked at him and realize that, should he ever have an inkling of what Madame and I had been discussing, or should she turn and lodge an accusation against me, my old comrade would, without a moment’s pity or hesitation, sling me out into the street. And then, for all my popularity, every door in Irkutsk would be closed to me. Except one: the local prison.

Pyavka, aware that some strange game was being played, sat hunched in his chair, flicking his eye from one of us to the other, careful not to draw attention to himself.

Vasya drank his coffee standing up. He held the newspaper to his face in his other hand. (I had stopped reading the local gazette with its gleeful accounts of the latest pogroms. Nor was there much comfort to be found in the Yiddish papers from Warsaw, which conveyed either a sense of utter helplessness, or breathed defiance with the facetious humor of impotent old men.)

An ugly quarrel suddenly broke out between Divanovsky and Madame. She wanted him to drink sitting down, as good manners required. He, in turn, demanded that she quit “dictating” to him. The quarrel grew more bitter, more personal. I was desperate to escape from the room before some of their venom spilled over onto me.

As quickly as it started, the quarrel was over. Paying no further attention to his wife, Divanovsky motioned to me to step outside. There was something he must tell me privately. My heart thundered with guilt. He suspected! He knew! She had told him everything!

In his bookless “library,” he shoved a cigar into my mouth, lit it for me and demonstrated how to inhale.

“All is in readiness,” he said.

For a brief, terrible moment, I thought he was talking about Madame and me.

“Your train is due to leave at ten-thirty tomorrow morning.”

Overwhelmed with relief, all I could think of saying was, “Nothing sooner?”

“You sound as though you can’t wait to leave us.”