The Poets' Wives (18 page)

She thinks again of the young woman on the stairs and wonders what will happen to her. She leaves her room and walks along the empty corridor. At the end window she stops and watches what must be a rising wind shiver and fret the trees. It will surely pluck the few remaining leaves. The sun is dropping low in the sky. The days are shortening. She feels the inescapable weariness of facing another winter. On the stairs the only sound is that of her own feet. The door of the store is slightly open. She hesitates then opens it and steps inside. There is no sign of the young woman. Sudden debris blowing against the slit of window startles her. It sounds as if a storm is coming. She stands by the same broken desk where earlier the young woman had sat and touches the wood with her fingers. What will happen to her? She would like to be wrong but she doesn’t think it likely that a young man whose family is important in the Party will be strong or brave enough to throw over everything for love. Perhaps the young woman will not make him choose but think that the forces ranged against her are too powerful and so will try to preserve her own secret by being the one who makes the break. She doesn’t want to ponder the possibilities because she knows that most of them hold only the likelihood of regret.

Why does regret linger so long? When they were taking Osip that final time she had already played out the scene in her head and rehearsed what she would say and yet in that very moment no words could be uttered. So she had spoken them every day until the news of his death in the desperate need to believe that somehow they would reach him however far away he was being held. She looks at the spades piled in the corner. Soon they will be needed again to clear the snow. There is a hollow thumping and moan of complaint from the fretwork of pipes. Did he need those words to take with him in the back of the lorry or were they already written on his heart because there were many times in those last years of exile when he seemed to know what she was thinking without her speaking? She wants to speak to him now and so she starts to tell him what she had prepared for the final moment but the words falter and then fade into nothing. She looks in desperation at the narrow window and tries again but in their place comes only the consciousness that winter is coming when the white-barked birch trees shorn of their leaves will slowly make shivering ghosts of themselves.

5

1934

There are only two beds and one chair in the room that serves as their hospital ward in Cherdyn. Even in hospital they are isolated in case their supposed infection is passed to others. Osip lies on the bed beside her and stares at the large clock that hangs on the opposite wall. Its face is moon white with thick black hands and numerals. He’s stared at it for a long time but speaks little.

Staff check on them at regular intervals. She carries their curses in her memory at her failure to look after him. After so many nights without sleep she had drifted off and when she awoke he had already clambered out of the second-floor window, and even though she had desperately tried to hold on to him by his arms, he had slipped out of the sleeves of his jacket and fallen to the ground outside. It’s his second attempt to kill himself and no more successful than the first, resulting only in the pain of a dislocated shoulder which amidst the curses and shouts a woman doctor had set back in place. The staff are frightened and angry that their negligence in allowing this thing to happen might incur the wrath of those whose orders were that he should be preserved. They blame her and as she is not to be trusted they are inspected regularly. Sometimes the open door briefly reveals the presence of peasants come for treatment, their beards and dress making them look like remnants from a different century.

Long journeys on trains, a river steamer and in the back of a truck have brought them here to this their first place of banishment with the three guards constantly at their side, keeping them separated from other travellers. Always vigilant but not unkind when out of the public gaze. It’s on the train journey that she first realises things aren’t right with Osip as he sits looking at the thickly wooded mountains of the Urals. He seems to stare somewhere far beyond the landscape and his talk is all of imminent death. Again and again he asks her if she can hear it, hear the voices, but for her there is only the rattle of the train, the snores of a passenger she can’t see and the squeak of the soldiers’ leather boots when they stretch their limbs or adjust their stance as they maintain the required separation from other passengers.

‘Can’t you hear them?’ he asks again.

‘What is it you hear?’ she asks, trying to calm him by taking his hand.

‘All the voices. Voices calling and whispering,’ he says, pressing her hand against his ear as if to stop the sounds.

‘There are no voices.’

He looks at her and she sees the disbelief fixed there. She believes they have done something to his mind in the prison and despite her thinking that they have given back her husband, the person who sits opposite her is changed in some ways she can’t understand.

‘What do the voices say?’ she asks.

‘I can’t make them out. They’re calling and shouting but their words aren’t clear. Are you telling me the truth when you say you hear nothing?’

She nods and reaching across gently prises their hands from his ear and tries to calm him once again by talking about anything that comes into her head so she remembers things from their past, places they’ve been, their old circle of friends, tells him quietly about the women who came to the apartment with money when they heard that they’d been exiled. But none of her words seem to penetrate beyond his fear. She remembers how going through the forest in the back of the truck he had seen a peasant standing with an axe and he had said that they were going to behead him. Nor does it seem to be death he now fears but the ever-present reality of its imminent and sudden violence – the bullet to the back of the head, the firing squad. He sits hunched and tense as if expectant that he will be taken to such an end at any moment, even there on the train as it cuts a path through steep-banked swathes of trees whose branches seem to reach out like hands towards the glass.

Much later when he starts to recover and they have been allowed to reside in Voronezh he will try to tell her some of what happened in the Lubyanka – the sleepless nights under the lights; the night-time interrogations with their threats and insults and the constant repetition of questions he’s already answered; the stool pigeon who shares his cell and whose purpose is to pile more stress on him with his talk of darkest consequences; being taken from the cell by the guards and being made to wait for hours for more sessions, or something worse, that never happens. Being put in a straitjacket after the first suicide attempt. There were voices there too, the voices of a crying woman he thought was her but again whose words he couldn’t make out. They had led him to believe that they were holding her. He tries to tell her about what happened to him but for all his skill with language she can see his frustration as he struggles to convey what is so far beyond the reach of human words. However she comes to understand that whatever the details of his experience in those weeks, the truth is that his mind has been battered and bruised and he has been forced asunder from who he is. As she looks at his fear-flecked eyes that seem to see menace in every fleeting glimpse of the landscape she too is frightened and unsure whether the man she knows will ever come back to her.

Later on she will be told by those who have also experienced the terror that it is what happens to everyone who goes through the hands of their oppressors. But she also believes how much worse it must have been for a man whose every sense is sharpened and who sees the world and everything around him with the clear-eyed vision of the poet. So now every brick and every smell, every silence and every scream are branded in his consciousness and for the moment at least their memory threatens to unbalance him and leave him frightened by each shadow that falls across his path.

He lies on the bed and stares at the clock. Its ticking seems to grow ever louder in the silence. His arm in a sling prevents him turning on his side away from her and so he either rests on his back or lies facing her but it is as if he isn’t able to find all his old comfort in her presence. Sometimes she’s not sure he even knows who she is and then she tries to use her voice to reach him and to pull him back to her and to himself. But he has only eyes and ears for the ticking clock. Although she tries to block it out she remembers the eyes of the prisoner in the corridor and she wonders if there is a moment that comes to all when fear tips the mind out of its normal buoyant hope and sends it sinking into darker depths. She needs to sleep but is frightened to leave him even though he seems momentarily calmer and has displayed no further signs of wanting to harm himself. But the journey’s sleepless nights and the burden of worry have left her exhausted so although at first she tries to resist, gradually she feels herself slipping into sleep and knows she is powerless to prevent it.

Now it is her own voices she can hear – during the Civil War the screams of the trapped women thought to be Cheka who had fallen into the hands of the mob; the sound of Osip’s exultant voice pouring out his poem about Stalin; the late night, instantly recognisable knock on the apartment door. But there are silences too – the world outside the train’s window; the endless sitting in empty corridors when she tries to find people who will help. Sometimes she dreams of childhood and then everything is briefly different and the life that stretches ahead seems nothing so much as an adventure where she will play the leading role. But then everything changes again and it’s like some old story told in a different childhood where in the shadows lurks unseen evil that waits its chance to snatch the unsuspecting. And then she’s straying too close to the woods, ignoring all the warnings her parents have given, and she’s not paying any attention to anything other than the moment when it bursts from the darkness of the trees and is carrying her away. When she tries to scream no sounds come and she can see everyone in the village going about their business but she can’t find a voice to summon their help.

As she drifts into consciousness she thinks of songbirds in cages, small and huddled, half-hidden by the bars. She too is conscious of the clock’s ticking. Then her eyes are slowly opening and she feels no benefit of sleep but only an increased heaviness in her head that sinks through her whole body and leaves her limbs leaden. The back of her throat is sore and she tells herself to ignore it because it would be an unspeakable nightmare if she were to become ill. Then she blinks her eyes wide and sees that he’s not there, for a second starts to believe they have come for him, the images that so plagued him transformed into a physical reality. She whimpers then tries to calm herself by repeating ‘isolate but preserve’ – that was their sentence, but who is to know whether they were meaningless words that can be transmuted at the changing whim of someone in the chain of power? Perhaps now after this second attempted suicide they think they need to exercise their authority over his life before he is able to challenge it again, this time finally and fully.

She hurries from the bed and her legs feel shaky. She has to find him. But when she stumbles into the corridor and calls his name there is no sign of him. At first the nurses ignore her, walking by her as if she doesn’t exist, and for a moment she feels she is still in her dream and has no voice. Only the curious stare of a peasant woman sitting on a narrow wooden bench cradling a baby confirms her existence and she hurries on desperate to find him or where he’s been taken, until a nurse grabs her roughly by the arm and wordlessly points her to a kind of open courtyard. She sees him almost at once sitting at the end of what looks like a stone water trough and he’s staring up at the branches of a rowan tree. She stands beside him and at first she’s relieved to have found him, then she’s angry that he has caused her such worry, but he looks at her as if he’s just seen her for the first time and he’s pointing at the clusters of red berries with which the tree is laden. She glances up and the sun slanting through the branches makes her shade her eyes. The berries are intensely red and he’s pointing as if he’s never seen anything like them before. She sits beside him on the edge of the empty trough that holds the sun’s heat deep inside itself.

‘When there’s a good crop of berries they say the winter will be short and the snows less deep,’ he tells her, ‘and if the berries are few and lose their colour then the winter will bring illness and hardship.’

‘There’s plenty of berries,’ she answers. ‘The whole tree is covered in them.’

‘But the birds are beginning to eat them.’

‘We can’t begrudge them.’