The Secrets We Kept(33)

“Of course not. We are not that way anymore.”

“Did you sleep with anyone?” I asked. “I’ll understand if you had,” I added, though I didn’t mean it. He told me I had nothing to worry about, that my place in his life was forever cemented. That he kept company only with Lara during my absence.

And still I persisted, still I pushed. “No one?”



* * *





“He’s dead,” Borya said over the telephone.

I tightened my grip on the receiver. “Who is dead?”

He groaned as though he had stomach cramps. “Yuri,” he finally got out.

Tears came to my eyes. “He’s dead?”

“It’s done. My novel is complete.”

I arranged for the manuscript to be edited, retyped, and bound with a leather cover. I went into Moscow to pick up three copies from the printer and carried the box back on the train, the weight of Borya’s words heavy on my lap.

He was waiting for me at Little House. When I handed him the box containing his life’s work, he held it in his hands for a moment, then set it down and spun me around the room. We danced without music. As we spun, I saw myself in the oval mirror, and I, too, looked happy—but as a mother looks after she’s given birth: elated and exhausted, happy and pained, peaceful and at the same time terrified.

“Perhaps it will be published,” Borya said.

I thought of Anatoli Sergeyevich Semionov sitting at his large desk inquiring about Doctor Zhivago. I thought about the State’s obsession with what he had written. But I said nothing.



* * *



—

I scheduled meetings with every literary magazine, every editor, every publishing house, anyone who might publish Zhivago. I went alone to speak on Borya’s behalf. When pushed to describe his work, defend it, or even promote it, he felt he couldn’t. “It’s as if my own words are lost somewhere between putting them to paper and seeing them in print,” he told me.

So I spoke for him.

The editors met with me, but none made promises. A few said they’d possibly be interested in publishing the poems that came at the end of the novel, but my questions about publishing the book in full were never answered directly.

Many nights, Borya waited for me on the train platform for news of how my meetings in Moscow had gone. I tried to frame everything positively, talking more excitedly than was warranted about Novy Mir’s interest in publishing some poems, but Borya knew better. He’d walk me back to Little House in silence, his arm tightly intertwined with mine, as if I were holding him up.

Once, on my return from another fruitless trip, Borya stopped in the middle of the road and announced he no longer believed Zhivago would be published. “You mark my words. They will not publish this novel for anything in the world.”

“You must be patient. You don’t know that yet.”

“They’ll never allow it.” He scratched his eyebrow. “Never.”

I started to think he might be right. After yet another meeting with yet another publisher, Borya met me in Moscow so that we could attend a piano recital. We arrived early and sat on a bench under a chestnut tree.

A man who I thought I’d seen on the Metro stood at the end of the pond in front of us, watching the ducks. The man was young, wearing a long brown overcoat despite the heat.

“I feel as if we’re being watched,” I told Borya.

“Yes,” he replied, matter-of-factly.

“Yes?”

“I assumed you knew.” The man standing at the pond noticed us looking at him and walked down the path, disappearing from view. “Shall we go?” Borya asked. “We don’t want to be late.”

Borya maintained that the surveillance didn’t bother him. He’d even joke about it, addressing whoever was listening by speaking into a lamp or to the ceiling.

“Hello? Hello?” he asked no one. “How are you today?”

“I’m fine, thank you,” he answered himself.

“Are we boring you?” he asked a light fixture. “Maybe instead of what we’re having for dinner tonight, we should talk about something more interesting.”

“Will you stop?” I asked. I didn’t find his jokes funny, and I told him as much. “I’ve faced them before,” I said. “And I won’t do it again.”

He took my hand and kissed it. “We must laugh at it all,” he said. “It’s all we can do.”





WEST





February–Fall 1957





CHAPTER 8





The Applicant


   THE CARRIER


As the taxi turned left onto Connecticut, I pressed two fingers to my wrist the way Mama had taught me when I was a child and carsick. The feeling intensified when we hit Dupont Circle. I thought about getting out and walking, but that wasn’t the plan. I couldn’t deviate from the plan—not unless I was being followed.

I was told to hail a taxi at the corner of Florida and T at seven forty-five and take it to the Mayflower Hotel. The hotel was only a short walk from there, but the optics, they said, were better if I got out of a taxi.

I was told to avoid wearing anything that would make me stand out: flashy jewelry, too much makeup, an ostentatious hat, ostentatious shoes, anything ostentatious. I thought of all those sequined gowns filling our basement apartment, of all the women coming by to try them on and buy them from Mama. I didn’t own a single item of clothing that could be classified as ostentatious. My instructions were to dress well but not too well, to look nice but not too nice. I was to look like the type of woman who frequented the Mayflower’s bar, the Town & Country Lounge. The tricky part was that I was the type of woman who hadn’t even heard of the Mayflower Hotel, let alone the Town & Country Lounge.