The Secrets We Kept(72)

After, Teddy tried in vain to comfort me. Days passed, then weeks. One night, when I couldn’t sleep, I decided to call Sally. My hands shook as I dialed her number, but the line just rang and rang.





EAST





May 1958





CHAPTER 19





The Muse


   The Emissary


    THE MOTHER


I woke from a dreamless sleep to Mitya standing over me. “Someone is outside,” he whispered.

“Is it Borya? Did he lose his key again?”

“No.”

I swung my legs over the bed and toed the floor until I found my slippers. “Go back to your room.”

Mitya didn’t move as I fumbled for my robe.

“Mitya, I said go back to bed. And don’t wake your sister.”

“She heard it first.”

Before I could ask what they had heard, there was a crash. “It’s just a branch,” I said, my voice as low and steady as I could will it. “That poplar has been dead since last winter. I’ve told Borya we need to cut it…” Another sound outside stopped me. It was quieter, muted. It was no falling branch.

The sound of the front door opening sent us both running toward the entryway. Ira was there, standing in the doorway, barefoot, her white nightgown illuminated blue with moonlight. The sight of her startled me. She was a ghostly angel—a woman now. “Ira,” I said gently. “Close the door.”

Ignoring me, Ira stepped outside. “Come out!” she called out. Mitya pushed passed me to join his sister. I grabbed hold of his nightshirt, but he shrugged me off. “Show yourself!” he yelled, his voice cracking. Movement behind the woodpile at the side of the house sent both my children tripping over themselves to get back inside. I shut the door behind them and tested the knob to make sure it was locked.

“It’s them,” Ira said. “I know it.” As she hugged herself against the wall, she no longer looked like a beautiful apparition; she looked like my little girl again.

“Who?” I asked.

“A man followed me home from the train station yesterday.”

“Are you sure? What did he look like?”

“Like the rest of them. Like the men who took you away.”

“I’ve seen them too,” Mitya said. “They watch me from behind the fence at school. Two, sometimes three of them. They don’t scare me, though.”

“Don’t be silly,” I said, but I didn’t believe my words. Mitya was prone to exaggeration, and his very healthy imagination, as Borya had put it, resulted in stories. He’d found a piece of Sputnik in the woods. He’d saved a little girl in his class from a wolf that had wandered onto the playground. He’d eaten a magical plant that gave him the power to jump higher than a trolleybus.

But this story I did not doubt.

Zhivago had been published in Italy six months earlier, and with each new country that published the book—France, Sweden, Norway, Spain, West Germany—I could feel more eyes watching us. With each foreign publication, questions arose about why the book had not been published at home. For now, the State spoke no word publicly of the novel. Its hand was steady, but a tremor grew. I knew it was only a matter of time before they’d act.

I’d never spoken to the children about the men who sat in their black cars at the end of the drive, or the men who followed me whenever I went into Moscow. Instead, I just waited for what felt preordained—I waited for them to come for me.

I had done my best not to alarm the children. I closed the drapes, complaining of headaches. I locked the doors, saying a neighbor’s house had been broken into by some teenagers. I visited a kennel to see about getting a Caucasian shepherd, telling the man my son could learn some responsibility by taking care of a dog.

But my children were never fooled; they were too old for that. They knew to look for the truth not in my put-on smile or the words coming out of my mouth, but in my shaking hands, the bags under my eyes.

I did speak to Borya about my increasing fears, but he was distracted by the onslaught of letters from well-wishers, smuggled-in newspaper clippings of rave reviews from abroad, and requests for interviews. He was in demand—and I now had to share him not only with his wife, but with the entire world. The last time I spoke of the matter, we walked the path along Lake Izmalkovo. Borya was preoccupied with finding the right person to translate Zhivago into English. He answered my question about getting a guard dog by asking if I thought the English edition should include the poems at the end of the novel. “They’re saying the rhyme detracts from the meaning,” he said.

Everything was about the book, and nothing mattered more—not the fame the international editions had brought him, nor the looming threat from the State, nor his family, nor mine. He even put it above his own life. His book came first and always would, and I felt like a fool for not having realized that sooner.



* * *



—

As Ira held back tears and Mitya pretended to be strong, I was struck with the enormity of being utterly on our own. I gathered myself and peered out the window, but saw only the gentle sway of the poplars, their black shadows dancing on the gravel path.

Then movement.

The children jumped back, but I held still. I flung open the drapes.