The Woman in Oil Fields (20 page)

“We can make our own city,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“In the sky. Or under water.”

“With nasty boys?”

“And rich, spiced food.”

You smiled, pulling on your socks. “All right, Anya, you start.”

______

A priest stops me outside the prison. “Good woman, come pray with me.”

“I'm not a good woman,” I tell him. “Besides, there's no one to hear.”

Five or six rabbis also wait outside the gates.

“Of course there is. We each have an angel –”

I laugh. “I'm a descendant of Eve, Father. Read your Bible.” I lace my boots up tight.

“No forgiveness for those who won't seek it!” he calls after me.

______

In the bars, men sat at my table and swore they loved me. We discussed art about women, women as artists. One night Mikhail, a painter friend of mine, said, “Feminine beauty is an imperative.” He couldn't afford oils; I often gave him lipstick to mark his large canvases. “It tugs at my hand when I pick up the brush.”

“Romantic nonsense.”

“No no,” said another. “It's the serenity I'm interested –”

I slapped the table, spilling beer. “Listen to you. All of you. Have you ever really
seen
a woman?”

“We've offended poor Anna.”

“Here, have another glass,” the men said.

“You don't even
begin
to know –” I pulled a cigarette from a pack and leaned toward a white candle stuck in a bottle's mouth.

“A toast to Anna,” Mikhail teased. “A magnificent, fearsome woman.”

“Listen to me –” I said.

“To Beauty.”

“To Art.”

“And to bed.”

______

For many years after you'd gone (ripples flattening out; gas pockets in the mud, the sulfurous steam; bats whirring in the bushes) I resented you. And Nikolay, volunteering for the front, leaving me alone here in Petersburg. Even when the Bolsheviks murdered him I felt nothing but rage for my husband. Lev had just turned ten. I was drunk and loud each night in the Wandering Dog.

______

“The wasteland grows.” For a time, early in our marriage, Nikolay liked to puff himself up and quote European philosophers, to impress me.

“What do you do on these hunting trips when you're not hunting?” I asked him once. “Play cards? Go to brothels? What do men do on their own?”

“Why?” he said.

“I want to know, that's all.”

“We drink. We laugh. We talk.”

“What about?”

“Money. Philosophy. Your friends at the Dog aren't the only ones with thoughts in their heads.”

“What kind of philosophy?” I asked.

“The future, the world, that sort of thing.” He pulled off his boots. I massaged his feet. “The other night at dinner, Peter was telling us that Nietzsche – Peter's favorite – has a wonderful definition of mass violence – or, as he calls it, the True Twentieth Century.”

“What does he say?” I asked.

“‘The wasteland grows.'”

“That's it? ‘The wasteland grows'?”

“He wrote it in 1880 – or '90, something like that. Before the war. Before Verdun, the Somme … he was a prophet.”

Nikolay never noticed the paradox until I pointed it out. “Waste makes barren, limits, opposes growth,” I said. “How can a wasteland grow?”

He stared at me.

Years later, cleaning out his things, I understood the answer. The wasteland grows, spreads like a swamp, if we forget to remember.

______

When the Wandering Dog burned down, the poets and writers of Petersburg scattered, each like Lear without his kingdom.

Cigarettes, candles, amorous dancing – an accident, said the police. “Wild bohemian artists,” they called us. “Pimps and whores.”

Most of my friends stayed silent or quietly left. Now I sit by the Neva and wonder what they'd say about our city? Flat, white buildings, haphazard construction, the squalor of the market. Increasing numbers of soldiers on the streets. All this talk, from travelers, about the Reich's frightening power in Germany.

The wasteland grows
.

______

“She's famous. Why doesn't she say something on our behalf?” “It's because of her fame that her son is in jail.” “She's no better than the rest of us.”

The women's hushed voices echo beneath the pine wood ceiling. Lev lies, in a half-stupor, on the cold cell floor. I cup my palms beneath the spigot in the courtyard, run quickly back into the prison, but by the time my hands reach his lips there's nothing left to drink. “Lev, Lev …”

Fame is so much water.

Today I can't afford both dinner and a beer. I buy a squash, hurry home and toss it in a pot on the stove. Start some tea.

Early in the morning the men arrived
…

They came at dawn
.

At dawn they came
…

While the kettle whistles I write this sentence, tear it apart, make it again, slightly new.

______

Polonius, to Hamlet: “What do you read, my lord?”

“Words words words.”

______

A visitor from the West.

“I'm afraid I have only boiled potatoes to offer you,” I tell him.

“No no, nothing for me, thank you.” He settles uncomfortably into my armchair. Pillows stretch across the floor. Your picture, Lena, in a silver frame on my desk.

My guest's card (he helps me with the English) reads: Mr. Alfred Weller, First Secretary in the British Embassy in Moscow. He has requested this meeting with me out of admiration for my work.

“You've just returned from Paris?” I say.

“Yes. I have news of some of your friends.” His Russian is awkward; I stop him and ask him to repeat. “Aleksander Halpern, Pasternak, Shileyko – they're all doing well. Modigliani has become quite famous since he died.”

“Really! When I knew him he'd dig and dig in his pockets and never make the price of a drink.” We laugh. Mr. Weller watches me closely. His eyes are small; he hasn't much hair.

“They're very concerned about you, your friends. Every day we hear more rumors out of Germany. War seems inevitable.”

The tenant below noisily unlocks his door. We glance at the walls.

“Would I be any safer in Paris?”

“At least you'd be among friends. You could publish.” He stares appreciatively at my ankles.

“I couldn't leave Petersburg now. Old habits and all. I can hardly bring myself to say its new name. Leningrad. Cold and official.”

“Do you have any recent work I can take to your colleagues in Europe?” asks Mr. Weller. “They're eager to see what you're doing.”

I turn on my desk lamp. “As a matter of fact, I've just started a long poem – the first in nearly a year. It's dedicated to the women who wait with me outside the prison.”

“Yes, I heard about your son. I'm sorry.”

I glance at the page. It isn't about my son. Truthfully, I haven't thought of Lev in days. “Do you find me attractive, Mr. Weller?”

He fidgets with his coat. “Of course,” he says softly.

“Don't.” I read him the first lines of the poem:

At dawn they came to take you away.
You were my dead, I walked behind.
In the dark room the children cried,
the holy candle gasped for air.

I ask him, “Can you follow the meaning?”

“Yes,” he says.

“These words, these little scribbles, Mr. Weller, are all that matter to me. More than your admiration. More than the prison. Or my son.”

“You don't mean that.”

I sit. “Sometimes … sometimes after working I feel that way.”

“Then by all means come to Paris – where your poems can be seen.”

“I don't approve of emigration.”

He makes a little gesture with his hand. “If you'll forgive me, Miss Akhmatova, I think your stubbornness is misplaced. It's all very well to die for one's country –”

“Dying.
for
one's country is easy,” I tell him. “Dying
with
it is another matter entirely.”

______

“We have to make it easy for people to walk,” you said.

“Light and shade. Cool spaces for babies.”

“I'm not going to have any babies.”

“Oh, Lena, of course you will.”

“If it's a boy he'll grow up and leave you. Girls you never get rid of.”

“I'm not going to live with Mama all my life.”

“She's a stupid woman,” you said.

“No she's not.”

“Wrong about everything.”

“Like what?”

“Everything.”

“See, you can't say.”

“She shouldn't let Father hit her. And the lake. She's wrong about the lake.”

“Riga's the one who doesn't know anything.”

“The streets have to be wide enough for horses and carts. No automobiles. Absolutely no automobiles.”

“Maybe one or two?” I said.

______

I walk in a field of factory ash with only my shawl and a hairful of snow. My books have been burned in the square.

This morning Lev's face is bruised, his lips are chapped and torn.

“What did they do to you?”

A dry cough. “Stop it, Mother.”

“Don't strain. Quietly.”

He lifts his face toward mine. “They put a bag on my head. A bag of water. When they kicked me, my nose and throat filled till I thought I would drown. I couldn't stop choking.”

I stroke his sweating back.

“Who was it?” he says.

“What are you talking about?”

“In your apartment.”

“When?”

“‘As long as she entertains men in her apartment,' they said …”

He closes his eyes. His long black hair comes off in patches on my hands.

______

Not, not mine: it's somebody else's wound.
I could never have borne it. So take the thing that happened, hide it, stick it in the ground.
Whisk the lamps away …

______

“Bowls,” Mikhail said in the bar one night. “Jars. Glazed china plates.”

“Even the word ‘containers' is a conceptual burden placed on women,” I said.

“You take yourself too seriously, Anna.”

“I object to not being seen.”

“Men create these images in order to praise women, don't you see that? Angels. Swans. Damp, dripping caves –”

“You might as well be papering a wall, to hide what's underneath.” I snuffed the candle to punctuate the point.

“Delilah with her scissors …”

______

Just after we married, Nikolay and I traveled to Paris. I remember thinking, “These streets have leaped from my mind,” I felt so at home. I imagined the city of Kitezh looked something like this: women walking freely, laughing, in their light skirts and stockings.

In his quiet room Modigliani sketched me in pencil, the slender lines of my neck shading off into plumes.

One afternoon on my own (Nikolay and I had already grown restless in each other's company) I walked through a refurbished neighborhood on the Ile de la Cite. The sky had been dark all day; as I passed a laborer setting buckets of brown paint in the window of an unfinished apartment, hail began to patter the awnings. The laborer invited me inside. The apartment, he said, had once housed happy men, but they had all gone.

“Where did they go?” I said.

He seemed not to hear. “Where are you from? You don't look French.”

“Petersburg.”

“Ah, the noble peasant. High plains? Sheaves of wheat?”

“Well …”

He laughed, and tapped my finger. “A very pretty ring. Do you have any children?”

“No,” I said.

He was quiet for a moment, busying himself with his rags.

“My wife is in the clinic, expecting our first child,” he said finally. “Twenty years old, my wife. I'm quite a bit older, as you can see.”

As he spoke he cleaned his brushes in a little can of turpentine marked “Flammable.” His hands were long and explosive.

“I haven't gone to visit her.”

A piece of hail, like a heavy crystal wine glass tossed at the sill, tipped a half-empty bucket onto the waxed wooden floor. The man didn't move. Brown paint seeped into the cracks beneath the carpet; his child waited in a place without color.

“I don't know what to do,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“All these years. I didn't know a woman's body could be so huge.”

______

“Hippogriff, mermaid, manticore,” Mikhail said. “Siren, sister, witch.” Words words words. Crumbling wall, paper (a floral design) sagging to the floor, stretched across the rug like a dress dropped in haste. The naked animal herself out the window, on the canvas, trembling at the edge of the page. To a nunnery, in a winery, passed out on the dirt. Container and contained. In Pushkin's land.

______

Mr. Weller requests another chat. On the phone I tell him no. “The Party's asked me to write a poem praising Stalin.”

According to all reports, he says, the Germans are murdering hundreds of thousands of Jews.

“Why the Jews?” I ask.

He doesn't know.

My days are a series of nonmeetings. Admissions of nothing. The roomer below is afraid to meet me on the stairs.

______

“Brick towers.”

“No no, Lena, wood.” I laughed and pulled your hair.

“Brick is solid, Anya. We want our city to be solid.”

“Well,
my
city's going to be pretty and smooth. Lots of wood. And copper.”

“I'd rather be safe.”

“Wood's safe.”

“Not from fire.”

“There won't be any fires in our city. We'll run them out of town.”