The Poets' Wives (13 page)

After their banishment in Voronezh has ended, they risk a journey to Moscow hoping to raise money and speak to those who might help their situation. On the train they do not talk much but stare out at landscapes that have finally been surrendered by winter and are slipping into the first full flush of spring. No one makes eye contact with anyone else. They say there are some who ride the trains simply to listen for those whose tongues have been loosened by the illusion that they have been afforded the privilege of a private world momentarily separated from the rest of their lives. Everywhere white-barked birch trees quiver into loose-limbed leaf. Thick collars of pine tighten around tiny hamlets so it looks as if they are choking the life out of them. They pass ragged ribbons of villages that outwardly look as if history has left them untouched but she knows that this too is just another illusion and remembers the dispossessed kulaks and peasants who beg for food in the streets of Voronezh.

The money she had been given by the women who turned up at the apartment after his arrest is now exhausted. There is no work despite Osip going on a regular basis to the local Writers’ Union. Even the translation has ended. In the winter they will stop his pension. They live on cabbage soup and eggs, manage when they’re lucky to acquire tea and butter, some cigarettes. She has made earlier trips to the Moscow offices of the Writers’ Union where she sees Marchenko or Shcherbakov but their faces are blank and stony, their eyes hard, and she knows they have no help for her. At first she thinks her words can be sharp flints that will chip away at them until she carves out the human beneath the surface but their impassive faces blunt her pleas and she goes away empty-handed.

In Moscow outside the railway station they see Petrov who once loved nothing better than to come to the flat for supper and debate. Osip raises his hand in greeting and she watches it freeze in the air as Petrov turns on his heels and crosses to the other side of the road. They are plague carriers, marked as infected, contagious to all who come in contact with them. Only the strangers rushing through the crowded streets or piling on to the overcrowded trams are able to brush against them, briefly share the air they breathe. But even then the protective shield of anonymity feels paper-thin, able at any moment to be torn asunder, and so they huddle closer together as each moment torments them with the possibility of denunciation. She listens to the struggle of his breathing and is frightened that the journey will prove too much.

‘Let’s not judge him too harshly,’ he says suddenly.

‘We were always good to him,’ she replies. ‘Why must you always be like Christ, offering your cheek to the betrayer?’

‘Because he’s a weak man and who knows what fear has worked in him.’ And when she doesn’t answer, ‘Put your sword away, Nadia, he needs his ear if he is to survive.’

She goes to reply but reluctantly stops – they have no energy to waste in arguments about Petrov – and tells herself that perhaps it is because he has tasted fear he is not so quick to judge.

It was one of those who came to their home and was present at the reading of the poem about Stalin who betrayed them. Petrov had not been there that evening. She sees the circle of listeners in the faces of the strangers who stream all about her and wonders who it was and knows it is the curse of the age to suspect even those whose heart bears nothing but love. There is a sudden commotion on the pavement. A woman is shouting and waving her arms, berating a younger woman who is bending down to gather up carrots that have fallen. A page of newspaper flaps on the ground. Her crime in the absence of paper bags in the shop is to wrap the carrots in a newspaper bearing Stalin’s photograph. As she bends down to retrieve them her face is curtained by the loosening fall of her hair and she has to pause to push it out of her eyes. The accuser towers over her, her face a burning red as she angrily denounces this act of criminality, and then stamps on a carrot that has rolled towards her with a repeated rhythm that makes it look as if she is doing some crazy dance. The younger woman scampers away desperately trying not to spill what’s left of her purchase as shouts pursue her. Then the shouting, stamping woman is transformed, carefully cradling the newspaper as if it is a young child she has taken into her arms to suckle.

‘So this is what we’ve come to,’ Osip says as he stands motionless but she encourages him to move away with a sharp pull on the sleeve of his coat. They have places to visit, information to seek, money to try and borrow. After the countryside the city’s waves of noise and movement seem clamorous, making her feel as if they are flotsam on its crowded currents. She thinks it strange that during the day life flows like this and there is little that signifies what goes on under the surface. It is at night that the fear emerges as families whisper, anxious that none of their voices carry through the thin makeshift walls that divide their living spaces. So the sound of a car stopping outside or the rise of the lift is enough to make them think their time has come. To die in your own bed becomes the unspoken dream. But what chance of such a welcome end when now there are quotas that must be met? So who can tell when the knock at the door will summon them to a different fate? Once it was thought that living quietly and guarding the tongue would ensure safety but now there is no way of knowing in advance or understanding what crimes they have supposedly committed. All around them there are sudden spaces like a wood where each day the axe comes to cut down more trees. Cuts them down supposedly to allow more light and air, to give the rest the chance of future growth, but in each of those spaces stretches a shadow that grows longer until it encompasses all of them.

They find a seat in one of the parks to allow him to regain his breath. There are children at play under their mothers’ watchful eyes. The weather is warming and in the lake some young boys sail a model boat. On their journey into exile they had transferred to a river steamer at Solikamsk and the kindly leader of their three guards – simple peasant soldiers more used to transporting those convicted of spying or sabotage – had helped them to gain a cabin where Osip could rest. They had stayed on deck – the greatest distance they had permitted themselves – obviously having decided that his physical condition and his crime of poetry rendered him unlikely to present the possibility of problems. Psychologically he was in a bad state then, the worst she had ever seen him. She had tried to calm him, soothe away the reverberations that echoed discordantly in his head. All those things that allowed him to be a great poet – heightened sensitivities and senses, the sharpest perception – now conspired against him to flood his mind with what he didn’t want to remember in all the starkness of their horror and gave him no peace.

A breeze catches the sail of the boys’ boat, sending it curving through the water, bisecting the shadowy surface with a bevelling white. The boys’ cries of pleasure accompany it even when it seems to lean precariously close to the surface. Suddenly he gets up and walks to the edge of the pond, each step accompanied by the piping, wheezing descant of his breathing. She watches him stand with his back to her and yet is still able to see the pleasure he takes in the boat’s untrammelled flight as it runs before the wind. He takes a child’s delight in it, even holding his hand up in alarm as it finally slips sideways and its sail flops into the water. There has always been something childlike about him but she isn’t sure if it’s something that she admires or is irritated by. He turns again to resume his seat beside her. Even that short exertion has tired him and when he takes her hand she isn’t sure whether it’s from affection or merely to assure himself of her presence and support.

They watch the boys squabble amongst themselves until the tallest takes off his shoes and rolls up his trousers before carefully feeling his way, stepping with exaggerated caution. One of the other boys picks up a small stone and gently throws it to make a splash but is rebuked by the others and he wanders off shame-faced.

‘Children still play,’ he says. ‘Whatever happens in other places children still play.’

But she won’t let herself take any comfort in whatever he has to say about children’s play and tells him that soon they must be moving again, reminds him of their need to find money and help before they have to return once more. She knows he would be content to sit in the warming sun and watch everything the park has to offer, to devour it voraciously and find in it some sustaining sustenance not open to her because already she can hear the low rumble of her stomach and feel the sharp stirring of a headache. There is no sunlight or reverie that can banish their insistent clamouring for her attention. Carefully she takes the cloth-wrapped portion of bread and the hardening wedge of cheese from her pocket then spreads a white handkerchief on her knees like a tablecloth and places the only food they have left on it. With a stub of a knife she slowly divides the bread and cheese into two portions and hands him his half. They have nothing to drink but perhaps the park will have a drinking fountain they can find when they have finished. She is instantaneously pleased but then irritated again by the look of gratitude and joy on his face. ‘A feast fit for a king,’ he says and there is no sarcasm in his voice. She hears herself reply, ‘A feast only fit for a king in penurious exile.’ Then they eat in silence, concentrating on prolonging the meagre meal, carefully retrieving every crumb that falls, trying perhaps to conjure some greater sense of pleasure than the stale ingredients afford.

‘We must go soon,’ she tells him when they have finished, suddenly conscious of how often she speaks as if a mother to her child. ‘There are places we need to try. Time is getting on.’

He nods but makes no effort to move. Out in the pond the boy has retrieved the boat, pulling it towards him with a long hooked stick. Its sails are bedraggled.

‘They’ll dry soon in the sun,’ he says loudly and she isn’t sure if the words are for her or for the boys but she feels a flurry of anger at his capacity to be positive about so many things and tells herself it is a delusion, a dangerous delusion. On some whim that she doesn’t fully understand his life has been momentarily allowed to him but he stands at the very edge of the abyss, exposed, vulnerable, and when the wind changes it will topple him into the pit as surely as night follows day. So what right has he to sit there and let the sun warm his face and believe that it will dry the sails? But she understands that there is another reason why he doesn’t want to leave and for a second she too almost believes that if they sit still and quiet then time and the future might simply pass over them leaving them eternally in this moment, preserved like insects in aspic.

‘You’re right,’ he says after a few minutes, ‘we must go on, rattle our begging bowls, throw ourselves on the kindness of others,’ and he brushes his coat as if there might exist the possibility of spilled crumbs. She folds the handkerchief away and arm in arm like some elderly couple they make their way out of the park and she is conscious of his breathing that sometimes brushes her cheek when he turns his head towards her. She is grateful that the intensity of the sun has slipped a little and welcoming of the breeze that is sneaking its way between buildings and stirring the awnings of shops, wakening the furled and sleeping flags. She tries to think her headache away but it feels as if the noise and grit of the city streets have taken lodgings in her brain and she wants to be in the park again watching the boat’s sails drying in the sun. She also tries to tell herself that there is dignity in struggle, in not simply giving up, but at two houses where they had hoped they might find help they are turned away, one with nothing more than a shrug of the shoulders through a partially opened door, and one with a welter of platitudes and excuses that embarrassed the deliverer even more than them.

So they have no other choice and as much as they don’t want to impose their need once more, desperation is always stronger than their sense of shame, and they make their way to the Shklovskis’ where they know they will not be refused. Victor and Vasilisa are out and so it falls to their two children to offer them hospitality and act as surrogates for their parents and they provide them with food and drink in the kitchen. Little Varia, taking obvious pleasure in assuming the adult role, plies them also with chatter and laughter while her older brother Nikita keeps a quiet eye on her to ensure she’s doing everything the way it should be done. It is a kindness they have experienced before but never take for granted and it is one of the few places, however briefly, they feel their life come closest to what they once knew. Osip jokes with Varia, tells her increasingly fantastic stories that make her laugh, and tries to provoke the taciturn Nikita into some similar response but the most he allows himself is a shy smile. She looks at the two children and wonders if he resents their absence then tries to balance out whatever pleasures they might have brought with the unspeakable difficulties that would also have come, not least the crushing worry about their fate in the event of their parents being taken in the night. She thinks of Voronezh where there is a feral gang of seemingly abandoned children who scavenge the streets before disappearing at night into some secret refuge. Soon the authorities will round these up too and they will disappear so suddenly that some citizens will question if they ever existed at all or whether they were merely a trick of the memory.

‘Nikita collects birds,’ Varia says. ‘He catches them – isn’t that cruel?’

The boy blushes and pushes his tongue against the inside of his cheek before he says, ‘I treat them well, it isn’t cruel, and after a while I release them,’ and he glares at his sister, looking directly at her as he adds, ‘It’s a hobby – lots of people do it.’

‘And what type of birds do you catch?’ Osip asks.