The Secrets We Kept(27)
CHAPTER 6
THE CLOUD DWELLER
Boris wakes. His first thought is of a train lighting a path through the countryside, bound for the White-Stoned Mother. Under a thin quilt, he flexes his feet and pictures Olga’s rounded cheek pressed against the train’s window. How he’d loved watching her sleep, even the way she snored, soft as a distant factory whistle.
In six hours, the train carrying his beloved will pull into the station. Olga’s mother and children will wait at the edge of the tracks, standing on tiptoes to be the first to see her step off the train. In five hours, Boris is to meet her family at their apartment on Potapov Street, so that they may all go to the station together.
Three years since he heard her voice. Three years since he touched her. The last time was on a bench in the public gardens outside the editorial offices of Goslitizdat. As they made plans for the evening, Olga had remarked on the presence of a man in a leather duster who seemed to be listening to their conversation. Boris had looked the man over and decided he was just a man sitting on a bench. “That’s all,” he told her.
“Are you sure?”
He squeezed her hand.
“Maybe you should stay with me instead of going home?” she asked.
“I must work, my love, but will see you tonight in Peredelkino. She’s in Moscow for two days,” he said, careful to never speak his wife’s name in Olga’s presence. “We can relax and have a late supper. And I’d like to get your thoughts on a new chapter.”
She agreed to the plan and kissed him on the cheek in the chaste way she did in public. He hated it when she kissed him like that, feeling more like an uncle, or, worse, her father.
Had he known their meeting on the park bench would be the last time he’d see Olga in three years, he would’ve turned his head and kissed her on her lips. He wouldn’t have rushed home to work. He would’ve believed her about the man in the leather coat. He wouldn’t have let go of her hand.
That evening, Boris waited for Olga to arrive at his dacha, but after many hours passed with no sign of her, he knew something was wrong. He went straight to Olga’s apartment, where her mother was sitting—nearly catatonic and fingering a giant slit in the sofa cushion. She looked up blankly when Boris entered the room, and answered his questions in pieces. “Men in black suits,” she said. “Two…no, three…all of her letters, her books…a black car.” Boris didn’t need exact answers to know who the men were or where they’d taken Olga.
“Where are the children?” he’d asked.
She picked up a black-and-white goose feather from the erupting cushion and rubbed it between her fingers.
“Are they here? Are they safe?”
When Olga’s mother didn’t answer, Boris went to the children’s bedroom, and he was both relieved and heartbroken to hear Mitya and Ira’s muted crying from behind the closed door.
He turned and was surprised to see Olga’s mother standing in the hallway behind him. Before he could ask another question, she pelted him with her own. “You will go and get her, won’t you? To demand her release? To undo everything?” She waved the feather in his face. “To make up for everything you’ve done. The danger you’ve put her in.”
Boris had promised Olga’s mother he’d go straight to Lubyanka and do everything in his power to save her daughter. He hadn’t told her that he had no power at all, that it would be futile to knock on Lubyanka’s gates and demand Olga’s release. That his status as Russia’s most famous living writer could do nothing when their intentions were to hurt him through her. That if anything, they’d lock him up too.
He went home, not to his dacha in Peredelkino, but to his Moscow apartment, to his wife. Zinaida was seated at their kitchen table, smoking and playing cards with friends. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” she said when he came in.
“I’ve seen many ghosts,” he told her. She’d recognized the look on her husband’s face. It was the same look he’d had many times throughout the Purges. During the Great Terror, thousands had been imprisoned, nearly all perishing in the camps. Poets, writers, artists. Boris’s friends, Zinaida’s friends. Astronomers, professors, philosophers. A decade had passed and the wounds still hadn’t healed—memories as bloody and red as the flag. She knew better than to ask what was wrong.
* * *
—
By the time Olga’s train arrives, she will have been traveling for four days. From Potma, she will have marched, then taken a train, then another train before reaching Moscow.
Boris gets out of bed and dresses in a clean white Oxford shirt and brown homespun pants with suspenders. Careful not to wake his sleeping wife, he walks down the stairs, slips on his rubber boots, and leaves the dacha through the side porch.
The sun’s crown appears over the tips of the budding birch trees as Boris walks the path through the forest. He hears a pair of magpies chattering somewhere in the branches and pauses to look up but can’t locate them. The path weaves its way toward a stream that’s risen considerably from the newly melted snow. Boris stops on the narrow footbridge and takes a deep breath. He loves the smell of the cold water flowing below.
From the sun, Boris estimates the time to be six o’clock. Instead of walking through the cemetery, around the perimeter of the Patriarch’s summer residence and down to the writers’ club, as he usually does, Boris cuts over to the main road to take the faster route home. He wants at least an hour or two to write before leaving to meet Olga’s family in Moscow.