The Secrets We Kept(5)
I didn’t respond.
He stood and handed me a stack of blank paper. He pulled a gold-plated pen from his pocket. “Here, use my pen.”
He left me with his pen and his paper and his three guards.
Dear Anatoli Sergeyevich Semionov,
Do I even address this as a letter? How does one properly address a confession?
I do have something to confess, but it is not what you want to hear. And with such a confession, where does one even begin? Perhaps at the beginning?
I put the pen down.
The first time I saw Boris, he was at a reading. He stood behind a simple wooden lectern, a spotlight glinting off his silver hair, a shine on his high forehead. As he read his poetry, his eyes were wide, his expressions big and childlike, radiating out across the audience like waves, even up to my seat in the balcony. His hands had moved rapidly, as if directing an orchestra. And in a way, he had been. Sometimes the audience couldn’t hold back and yelled out his lines before he could finish. Once, Boris had paused and looked up into the lights, and I swore he could see me watching from the balcony—that my gaze cut through the white lights to meet his. When he finished, I stood—my hands clasped together, forgetting to clap. I watched as people rushed the stage and engulfed him, and I remained standing as my row, then the balcony, then the entire auditorium emptied.
I picked up the pen.
Or should I begin with how it began?
Less than a week after that poetry reading, Boris stood on the thick red carpet in Novy Mir’s lobby, chatting with the literary magazine’s new editor, Konstantin Mikhailovich Simonov, a man with a closet full of prewar suits and two ruby signet rings that clinked against each other when he smoked his pipe. It was not uncommon for writers to visit the office. In fact, I was often charged with giving the tour, offering them tea, taking them to lunch—the normal courtesies. But Boris Leonidovich Pasternak was Russia’s most famous living poet, so Konstantin had played the host, walking him down the long row of desks, introducing him to the copywriters, designers, translators, and other important staff. Close up, Boris was even more attractive than he had been on stage. He was fifty-six but could’ve passed for forty. His eyes darted between people as he exchanged pleasantries, his high cheekbones exaggerated by his broad smile.
As they neared my desk, I grabbed the translation I’d been working on and began marking up the poetry manuscript at random. Under my desk, I wiggled my stockinged feet into my heels.
“I’d like to introduce you to one of your most ardent admirers,” Konstantin said to Boris. “Olga Vsevolodovna Ivinskaya.”
I extended my hand.
Boris turned my wrist over to kiss the back of my hand. “Pleasure to meet you.”
“I’ve loved your poems since I was a girl,” I’d said, stupidly, as he pulled away.
He smiled, exposing the gap between his teeth. “I’m actually working on a novel now.”
“What is it about?” I asked, cursing myself for asking a writer to explain his project before he was finished.
“It’s about the old Moscow. One you’re much too young to remember.”
“How very exciting,” Konstantin said. “Speaking of which, we should chat in my office.”
“I’ll hope to see you again then, Olga Vsevolodovna,” Boris said. “How nice I still have admirers.”
It went from there.
The first time I agreed to meet him, I was late and he was early. He said he didn’t mind, that he’d gotten to Pushkinskaya Square an hour early and had enjoyed watching one pigeon after the next take their place atop Pushkin’s bronze statue, like breathing, feathered hats. When I sat next to him on the bench, he took my hand and said he hadn’t thought of anything else since meeting me—that he couldn’t stop thinking about how it would feel to see me approach and sit down next to him, how it would feel to take my hand.
Every morning after, he’d wait outside my apartment. Before work, we’d walk the wide boulevards, through squares and parks, back and forth across every bridge that crossed the Moskva, never with any destination in mind. The lime trees had been in full bloom that summer, and the entire city smelled honey sweet and slightly rotten.
I’d told him everything: of my first husband, whom I’d found hanging in our apartment; of my second, who’d died in my arms; of the men I’d been with before them, and the men I’d been with after. I spoke of my shames, my humiliations. I spoke of my hidden joys: being the first person off a train, arranging my face creams and perfumes so their labels faced forward, the taste of sour cherry pie for breakfast. Those first few months, I talked and talked and Boris listened.
By summer’s end, I began calling him Borya and he began calling me Olya. And people had begun to talk about us—my mother the most. “It’s simply unacceptable,” she’d said so many times I lost count. “He’s a married man, Olga.”
But I knew Anatoli Sergeyevich did not care to hear that confession. I knew what confession he wanted me to write. I remembered his words: “Pasternak’s fate will depend on how truthful you are.” I picked up the pen and began again.
Dear Anatoli Sergeyevich Semionov,
Doctor Zhivago is about a doctor.
It’s an account of the years between the two wars.