The Secrets We Kept(28)

There’s a light on in the kitchen as he approaches. Zinaida’s heating up the stove and cooking Boris’s usual breakfast: two fried eggs with dried dill. Despite a chill in the air, Boris strips and washes himself in his outdoor tub. Even after his dacha was winterized with a new bathroom and hot water, Boris still prefers to bathe outside, the cold water a pleasant shock to the system.

As Boris dries off with a musty towel, his old dog greets him by licking the drops of water trailing down his long, skinny legs. Boris pets Tobik’s head and chides the half-blind mutt for not joining him on his morning walk yet again.

Boris’s ears are assaulted by the sound of the television as he enters the dacha. Zinaida had insisted on having a television installed. He’d fought it for months but gave in when she threatened to stop preparing his meals. The television, a luxury, is replaying Stalin’s funeral for the hundredth time. Boris pauses to watch as the camera focuses on the most grief-stricken faces in the crowd. He grimaces, then turns it off.

“What’s that?” Zinaida calls from the kitchen.

“Good morning,” Boris answers. He’s not hungry but sits anyway. She sets his plate down and pours him a cup of tea. She doesn’t join her husband at the table, instead turning back to the sink to wash the frying pan while smoking a cigarette, letting the ashes fall into the drain.

“Could you open the window, Z?” Boris asks. He hates the smell of cigarettes, and although Zinaida promised to cut back, she has yet to. She sighs, stubs it out, and finishes washing the dishes. Boris looks at his wife in the morning light streaming in from the window above the sink. The lines on her forehead and rolls of skin banding her neck are blurred for a moment and she looks just the picture of the woman he’d married twenty years earlier. He thinks about telling her she looks lovely, but a pang of guilt because he’s about to meet Olga stops him.

The clock in the hallway chimes seven. Olga’s train arrives in four hours. Boris forces himself to finish his breakfast. Swallowing the last bite of eggs, he pushes his chair back from the table.

“Off to write?” Zinaida asks.

With the question, Boris begins to suspect his wife already knows his plans. “Yes,” he answers. “As always. But just an hour or so. I have business in the city.”

“Weren’t you just there yesterday?”

“That was two days ago, dear.” He pauses. He’s out of practice in lying to his wife. “I’m meeting with an editor at Literaturnaya Moskva. He’s interested in some new translations.”

“Perhaps I’ll join you,” she says. “I have some shopping to do.”

“Next time, Zina. We’ll make a day of it. Maybe take a walk and smell the budding lime trees.”

Zinaida nods. She takes his plate and washes it in silence.



* * *



—

Boris sits at his writing desk. From the wicker basket at his feet, he takes the pages he wrote the day before. He frowns and strikes through a sentence with a fountain pen, then a paragraph, then a page. He pulls out a fresh sheet of paper and attempts the scene again.

The desk had belonged to Titsian Tabidze, the great Georgian poet and his dear friend. In ’37, during the height of the Purge, Titsian was taken from his home one autumn evening. His wife, Nina, had run into the street, chasing after the black car in her bare feet. When they charged him with treason for committing anti-Soviet activities, Titsian named his favorite eighteenth-century poet, Besiki, as his only accomplice.

Boris has imagined many times what happened to Titsian after the black car took him away, believing that if he doesn’t imagine his friend’s fate, Titsian will have suffered alone. He often tells himself there’s still a possibility his friend is alive, but Nina gave up such hope long ago. When she gave Boris her husband’s desk, she told him he must continue Titsian’s good work. “Write the great novel you’ve dreamed of,” she told him. Boris accepted Nina’s gift, but he never felt worthy of it.

Titsian wasn’t the first of Boris’s friends to have been taken. Boris often pictures them at night, when he can’t sleep, running their fates through his mind one at a time. There is Osip, shivering in a transit camp, knowing his end was near. Paolo, walking up the steps of the Writers’ Union and standing still for a moment before putting a gun to his head. And Marina, tying the noose, then throwing the rope up over a ceiling beam.

It was well known that Stalin had enjoyed Boris’s poetry. And what did it mean to have such a man find kinship through his words? To what had the Red Tsar connected? It was a hard truth, knowing he no longer owned his words once they were in the world. Once published, they were available for anyone to claim, even a madman. And it was even harder knowing he’d been struck from Stalin’s list, the madman having told his minions to leave the Holy Fool, the Cloud Dweller, alone.

Boris hears the muffled chimes of the downstairs clock strike eight. Olga’s train arrives in three hours, and he’s yet to write a single word. The scene that flowed so easily the day before now refuses to appear.

He began Doctor Zhivago almost ten years earlier, and although he’s made much progress, he still wishes he could go back to the days when the novel first came to him, when it was still pouring from some untapped pool inside him. It had felt like finding a new lover—the obsession, the infatuation, his thoughts on nothing else, his characters infiltrating his dreams, his heart weightless with every new discovery, every sentence, every scene. At times, Boris had felt it was the only thing keeping him alive.