The Poets' Wives (14 page)

‘Sometimes songbirds, but not always. There are collectors who have large collections and some even train their birds to do tricks or sing.’

‘Just like the Union of Writers,’ Osip says and he laughs so hard at his own joke that they laugh at his laughter as he slaps the table with the palm of his hand and makes the cups dance.

Varia challenges him to a game of chess and when Nikita tells her that she isn’t a good enough player to challenge people she rolls her eyes and rattles on about how it’s the only way to learn. It’s been so long since Osip’s played chess and she watches him handle the pieces with curiosity, turning them over in his hands as if trying to conjure their names and roles through the touch of his fingers. He puts the king and queen on the wrong squares and Varia reaches across the board and rights them and he shakes his head in an exaggerated frustration at his own stupidity.

They sit at the kitchen table and play and she doesn’t know if he’s deliberately letting her win or whether what has happened has damaged his memory of even this. Each time Varia takes a piece she lifts it with a flourish of her wrist and a wide smile and he shakes his head again from side to side.

‘She’s too good for me,’ he says ruefully as Nikita gives a little snorting noise.

If she can only exist in the moment she could almost feel happy but as soon as she thinks this, the knowledge of where they must return and what ultimately awaits them prevents her. She touches the solidity of the table then searches for some residue of warmth in her cup but none of it is enough and frightened that it will show in her face she rises and walks into the hallway. Then on impulse she turns and pushes open the door to Nikita’s bedroom.

There are four wooden cages hanging from the wall. In each a bird, she guesses, but they are only vaguely glimpsed. She doesn’t know if they are songbirds are not. They are barely visible through the bars and her appearance evokes only their silence. The bars are not uniform but misshapen spindles of wood that look as if they might shatter under any determined burst for freedom. The fading afternoon light has dulled the room and as she stands in the doorway she struggles to see the birds but doesn’t want to intrude. Then one hops from its perch and the whole rickety cage moves slightly on its hook. Some small ends of straw or husks of seed filter through the bars and pirouette silently to the floor.

From the outer hallway comes the sound of the lift. As always it fills her with dread and she remembers the suspicious, screwed-up face of the doorwoman who scrutinised them from top to bottom. Perhaps she has informed on them, perhaps they have been followed, and now the Shklovskis will be exposed to danger because of them. One of the birds shuffles again in its cage. All sounds from the kitchen have stopped – they too have heard. There are footsteps in the hall approaching the door of the apartment. Nikita appears at her shoulder, glances briefly towards his birds then walks past her towards the door. He is already taller than her but the awkwardness of his gangly, spindle-thin limbs is suddenly subsumed into a gliding elegance that almost makes him look as if he is silently skating. She watches him press his ear to it and then there is the sound of a key turning in the lock and he’s helping his parents, Victor and Vasilisa, hurry through.

She has almost forgotten what it is to be greeted by the unguarded openness of a friend’s smile and in its warmth she feels resurrected from the tomb, called momentarily back into the land of the living by an embrace and simple expressions of kindness.

‘Have they looked after you properly?’ Victor asks, looking at Nikita who is carefully locking the door again.

‘Perfectly,’ she says and then Vasilisa threads her arm and takes her through to the kitchen where Osip and Varia sit, their game suspended, and then Osip leaps up and in his desire to embrace his old friend upsets some of the chess pieces. Varia squeals at the prospect of her imminent victory being thwarted and starts to replace them.

‘Later, Varia, later,’ her father urges and she slumps back on her chair and folds her arms in sullen exaggeration.

‘She’s too good for me,’ Osip says in an attempt to mollify her and with a melodramatic gesture topples his king and slowly bows his head.

Vasilisa requests a detailed list of what her children have provided and then despite their protests cooks something more. She runs baths for them, finds fresh underwear and insists they rest while she gets the meal ready. When she calls them to the table they are embarrassed by the trouble she’s gone to and unsure whether to eat a little of the family’s hard-won provisions or to store up for the hungry days they know are coming. At times they can hardly eat for the conversation that flows – the discussion of their predicament, possible sources of money and information and as much as anything a welter of news and gossip – the latest symphony by Shostakovich, whose writing fortunes have risen, whose have fallen. After the meal Victor presents Osip with a coat and he models it with good humour.

While the men sit smoking in the kitchen, quoting poetry to each other, she drinks yet another cup of tea sweetened with sugar and finds herself glancing at the clock, wishing she could slow its hands. There is only one kindness they can give their hosts and that is to decline their invitation to stay the night. She knows the invitation is genuine and there have been times when they have slept on a rug-covered mattress but she cannot bear the possibility that accepting such kindness might result in consequences too terrible for her to contemplate. Nikita is filling a little glass dish with water and she assumes it is for the birds. She hopes he will release them soon. She tries to catch Osip’s eye but he is too deeply engaged in the pleasures of his conversation to notice. When Vasilisa offers to refill her cup she declines and tells her they must be going soon. It is as if her husband hasn’t heard her words and she understands that he has found a heady excitement, even a momentary fulfilment, in his dialogue about books and writing that he hasn’t been able to reach with her. So why should that be a surprise when they are locked together every minute of the day, their lives so tightly knotted that she no longer has any concept of one independent of his? She didn’t have to go into exile with him and she tries to remember whether there was ever a moment when she made the conscious decision to accompany him into the wilderness, but it was a question that simply never arose and so needed no answer.

As she looks about the kitchen – Osip and Victor debating some point about poetry as if their lives depended on it, Vasilisa busying herself with pots and pans, Varia sorting through her schoolbooks – she wonders if they will ever be able to allow themselves to come there again. They are infected like carriers of smallpox and the welfare of others demands they hold themselves in isolation. Does he realise this as he declaims some lines of poetry as if they are a sweet wine on his lips? And she feels a slow surge of bitterness that it was words on his lips that have brought them to this reckoning. A couple of minutes’ words slipping from his lips and the lives they knew taken from them. A particular set of words, the secret thoughts that swirl undetected in the mind suddenly made real and put in the world without thought for consequence. Was their release worth it, those words that now imprison their existence? And she wonders again how words can change a life so utterly. But of course they weren’t just words – ‘an act of terrorism’ was how the interrogator had described them. And now the terror is visited on them as she sits conscious of every time the lift approaches their floor in the apartment and wonders whether it will stop or pass by, remembers the glance given to them by the doorwoman, the constant feeling that they are being watched. It is surely one of their greatest skills that they let you, their victim, create and slowly imbibe your own terror.

As Osip and Victor sing in creaking harmony some old sentimental ballad they share from their childhood she wonders why he has set his mind so firmly against taking their own lives. Is there part of him that secretly believes this thing will pass over them, that they will simply be forgotten, or that some powerful influence affected by a warm memory of his past work will intervene on their behalf, allowing them to return to Moscow and resume their old life? Osip’s eyes are closed as if in some private place he’s seeing the memories the song evokes. She wants to tell him if he believes any of these things then his eyes are closed to the truth.

It is getting late. They must leave soon but she knows a spell has settled on him and it’s the happiest she has seen him in a long time, so whatever she does or says now will serve to break it. Getting up from the table she goes and sits in a corner, lets him drain the last pleasure from his song. Close by, Varia is humming her attempt at an accompaniment to a song that she doesn’t really know so she follows a few notes behind the adults. She is sorting schoolbooks in a satchel, ostentatiously holding them up for her guest’s perusal. Then as the song sidles into a melodramatic, drawn-out conclusion the child hands her an open textbook to look at. She takes it in both hands and tries not to let them tremble. There are pages of photographs and names pasted over with thick paper. More and more of them as she turns the pages. Party leaders, old revolutionaries, she guesses, erased by directive and from history itself as one by one they get swept into the pit. So this is how it ends. Removed from existence, excised from public memory. She looks at the faces still uncovered and wonders how many of them will be sent into the darkness – a bullet in the head in some cellar or prison courtyard, worked to death in the tundra – and then disappeared into unmarked graves. She looks at Osip. He has tears in his eyes – the sentiment of the song has proved too much. He rubs them dry with the back of his hand. What remains for those eyes still to see? He catches her looking at him, their eyes hold each other for a second, then without words she tells him what he already knows, that the time has come for them to go.

3

1947

A couple are rowing in the adjoining apartment, the thinness of the walls and the passionate anger of their voices playing out their marital failures to an audience who have no option but to listen. She shrugs her shoulders and lights the kerosene stove in the corridor. Reconstruction after the war promises them gas but she has little faith in promises any more. She measures out the leaves in the careful, miserly way that is ingrained in her and heats a pan of water. Then sitting on a little stool she rests her back against the shiver of wall that separates her from the warring pair. She warms her fingers on the flame and silently tells the couple on the other side of the wall that they should be grateful they have each other to fight with.

Despite knowing it no longer has any useful purpose and is a waste of precious energy she continues to ponder who betrayed them, even though she understands that its only result is to visit the guilt of one on all those in the apartment who heard him read the poem – some of them counted as dearest friends. All now tainted with suspicion. Perhaps if she had the guilty to hate it would be a comfort. She tries to remember those assembled, to compose the exact scene with the frozen clarity of a photograph, tries to match a face with an expression that might reveal the Judas as they listened to Osip declaiming those words that history will say have changed their lives. Sometimes she too likes to believe the poem did change their lives because it makes everything simpler, but if she’s honest with herself she knows his fate was already sealed – it was there in the whisperings that grew too loud to be safely ignored, the veiled condemnation of previous works, the way he found himself pushed to the very margins.

There were always spies, of course, just as there still are. In every apartment block, in every single tributary of human engagement, a secret empire of listeners relay to their masters whatever it is they want to hear. But the night he delivered the poem about Stalin they both believed only the true and the faithful were his listeners. Would it have made any difference if he had known otherwise? Part of her suspects that this was the path he had chosen for himself and that it seemed to him that he had no other road to take. He never spoke to her about it, before or after. But when he uttered those words about ‘the murderer and peasant-slayer’ she sensed that he had freed himself in some way, so that the feeling he was left with was not fear of the consequences but in that moment a powerful release. In the poem’s uncharacteristic and unsubtle directness everything that he had seen in the previous years and everything he felt about the inviolability of poetry’s commitment to truth seemed to be released.

Part of her is proud of it but some part of her angry that he allowed their future to be determined by his own needs. As she sits alone in the tiny space that serves as a communal kitchen and heats tea on the stove she remembers the visit he had made to the Crimea, the journey through the Ukraine and the Kuban. She pushes her back against the wall as if its thin solidity might prevent her own images returning. But it’s as if the voices next door pierce the seal of memory to reveal once more the spectres of starving peasants, moving like ghosts through a familiar landscape suddenly ripped from them and rendered remote and hostile. The swollen stomachs, the spindle-limbed children with hollowed sockets for eyes, almost too exhausted to hold out their begging hands. Heaped piles of corpses like broken, tangled bird nests fallen at the sides of roads waiting to be shovelled into the back of a cart. The black halos of buzzing flies. People clutching on to existence by eating grass and roots, the bark of trees.