Among the Russians(52)
We sat beside the moat under the trees. Before her vocal training could be finished, she said, she had been in hospital for almost a year. When she returned to singing, both her will and her strength had gone. But she was smiling without self-pity. She was like a child listening to her own story. She said: ‘I’d like to sing for you some time. When are you leaving?’
‘Tomorrow.’
‘Tomorrow!’ With the same delight as she had begun talking to me, her expression clouded and she lowered her head. ‘But I’ve only just got to know you!’
For a few minutes, while we discussed other things, her gaze hunted about the black trees and the star-filled moat. Then, warmed by new thoughts, she began to talk of her past again, staring at me through her strange, pale eyes and pressing her thigh against mine. Her hair brushed my neck. Although her father was dead, she said, her family was rich—yes, there were many rich Latvian families—and she didn’t have to work. At the age of twenty-two she’d adopted a baby boy whose parents were dead (was he in fact, I wondered, her own?) and the child had become everything to her, and she to him: mother, father, sister. Did I like children, she wondered? And soon she was asking me about my own life with the same rather haunting frankness. What did I do? Why was I alone?
Most of her questions seemed unanswerable. Looking into her open face with its commonplace shine of teeth through parted lips and the yeasty candour of her eyes, I felt unforgivably complex. When I said that I loved a woman in England, the brightness drained from her. We fell foolishly silent. I remembered a British student at Moscow University who had received eleven proposals from girls to whom the West seemed a Mecca of youthful emancipation. It wasn’t a Mecca which I felt I suggested. When the girl stared at me, I had no idea what she saw. In the darkness, I suppose, I looked young enough, and seemed gentle, and was listening.
But the next moment she had recovered and was laughing and whispering rude things about the Russians in my ear. We walked slowly back to our separate rooms. She squeezed her fingers between mine. Even her brazenness did not seem to be that at all, but the lonely need of an orphan.
6. Toward Caucasus
A FEW MILES south-west of Moscow the village of Peredelkino is scattered among woods and ponds. It was created as a colony for writers in the thirties, and its trees are interspersed with wooden dachas in orchards and wild gardens. Over its steep hillside an overgrown cemetery climbs in dense throngs of headstones and iron-grilled mounds, threaded by paths.
I stopped here one evening on my way south and sought out the grave of Pasternak. A simple plinth on the lip of the slope, it was crowded by jars of phlox and daisies, and strewn with berried twigs.
Beyond, across a ploughed field, the dacha where he lived for twenty-five years until his death in 1960 stood in silence. It looked private, deathly still. It was here, while almost all his great contemporaries were swallowed up by labour-camps or suicide, that Pasternak—on Stalin’s inexplicable whim—survived. Through 1957, when Doctor Zhivago was being scrutinized by Soviet officials and published with uproar in Italy, his time was spent in the secluded house, ordered by a formidable, sad and half-estranged second wife. Here too he received news of his Nobel Prize award, and marched out to think in the rain-filled woods, where hours later a bevy of foreign newspaper correspondents found him still walking. Already the monolithic Party machine was moving against him.
I stared along an overgrown drive. Only since entering Russia had I understood the dead weight of patriotism in this persecuted land—truth is only a troubling spectre in the balance against it—and how a single book or poem can threaten the fantasy of Party infallibility. That Doctor Zhivago could be castigated as it was, is both a measure of profound insecurity and of the strength of Pasternak’s commitment to something else. ‘The Russian poet,’ wrote Maxim Gorky, ‘is an indescribably lonely, tragically lonely figure.’
As I walked up the dacha’s drive (I had an introduction to Pasternak’s eldest son) the place already seemed a cenotaph. The house showed no lights. Even the birches were still. Nearby a path wound among twisted tree-roots to a plank bridge over a little lake, where once lived the woman Pasternak loved, the prototype of Doctor Zhivago’s heroine, Lara.
Zhenya Pasternak looked startlingly like his father. He lived in a cottage beside the larger house, with his wife and daughter. A dust of grey hair was thinning from his brows, yet he seemed young. His face held the gaunt, Pasternak distinction, touched by a kind of harrowed sweetness. The same indrawn cheeks and jowls separated the forehead from the full-lipped mouth, as if dividing continents. He had spent his early life as a technical engineer, he said—his father had warned him that the arts were dangerous—but now he devoted himself to collecting his father’s letters, and to publishing his works when he could.
We sat in his kitchen. A clock cuckooed on one wall; a samovar gleamed on top of a cupboard. Our conversation ranged over poetry, archaeology, friends in England. He was gently learned. He scented my interest in the Middle East and discussed the site of Ebla and the origins of the alphabet, speaking in a soft drawl. Usually his gaze would be fixed on a point somewhere along the table’s edge. Then his tall forehead would appear dissociated from the rest of his face, its brown eyebrows stuck there independently, until he would suddenly look up and his expression coalesce again around hazel-grey eyes.