The Secrets We Kept(83)

She runs to meet him. They embrace and he’s enveloped by her, even though she’s the one who fits neatly inside his arms. Her touch is a poultice.

Boris feels Olga holding her breath and rubs her back as if to prompt the exhale. She pulls away and confirms what her body has already told him she is thinking. “What will they do to us now?” she asks.

“It’s a good thing,” he says. “We should be celebrating. They won’t be able to touch us. The world will be watching.”

“Yes,” she says. She looks around the cemetery. “They are watching.”

He kisses her forehead. “It is a good thing,” he repeats, trying to convince himself. He looks in the direction of his dacha. “The vultures are waiting. I must face them.”

“You’ll accept the Prize, then?”

“I don’t know,” he tells her. But he can’t imagine not accepting. His life has led to this precipice; how can he not take this final step, even if into the abyss? If he retreats now, each time his beloved smiles, he will see the chip in her tooth from her days in the camps and will be reminded that it was all in vain.

Olga smooths the front of his jacket, her hand pausing at his heart. “Come to me when you can?”

He places his hand atop hers and presses it deeper into his chest.



* * *



—

The rain has ceased and the crowd has grown. Neighbors have joined the reporters, trampling his potatoes, his garlic, his leeks. A few men in black leather dusters mill about. Zinaida is standing on the side porch with Nina Tabidze, who is visiting from Georgia. They’ve placed two wooden chairs at the bottom of the steps to block entry, and Boris’s dog, Tobik, keeps watch from underneath one.

Zinaida moves a chair to let Boris enter, but Boris pauses to talk to the reporters. Since his meeting with Olga, his spirits have brightened considerably, and although he doesn’t fully believe what he’s told her, the words have soothed him. The congratulations ringing out from the crowd are also a balm. A photographer asks for his picture, and Boris poses for the portrait, a genuine smile across his face.

Zinaida is not smiling. Her heavily penciled eyebrows make her look surprised, but her black frown says otherwise. “Nothing good will come of this,” she says as her husband comes up the stairs.

“People on the streets of Moscow are already talking about it,” Nina says, replacing the wooden chair. “A friend heard it on Radio Liberation.”

“Let’s go inside,” Boris says.

Once inside, the smell of plum pie greets them and Boris remembers that it is Zinaida’s name day. “My dear,” he says. “I’m so sorry. In all this commotion, I’ve somehow forgotten.”

“It doesn’t matter now,” she replies.

Nina touches Zinaida’s shoulder, then goes to the kitchen to take the pie out of the oven.

The couple stands alone in the entryway. “You are not happy for me, Zina? For us?”

“What will happen to us?”

“What nonsense. We should be celebrating. Nina!” he calls to the kitchen. “Bring out a bottle of wine.”

“It’s not a time for celebrating,” Zinaida says. “They’ll want your head for this. First you give your manuscript to foreign hands, without its being published here? Now this? The attention, the outcry. No good can come of this.”

“If you cannot bring yourself to muster congratulations, at least have a drink for your name day.”

“What does it matter? You forgot it last year too.”

Nina returns from the kitchen holding a bottle of wine and three glasses, but Zinaida waves her away and retires to her bedroom. Nina goes to comfort her friend, and Boris opens the bottle himself.



* * *



—

The next day, Boris’s neighbor, the author Konstantin Aleksandrovich Fedin, knocks on the door, and Zinaida opens it. “Where is he?” Fedin asks. Without waiting for an answer, he bypasses Zinaida and takes the stairs up to Boris’s study, two steps at a time.

Boris looks up from a stack of telegrams. “Kostya,” he greets his friend. “To what do I owe this visit?”

“I am not here to offer you congratulations. I’m not here as your neighbor or friend. I’m here on official business. Polikarpov is at my house right now waiting for an answer.”

“An answer to what?”

Fedin scratches his bushy white eyebrows. “Whether you will renounce the Prize.”

Boris throws down the telegram he’s holding. “Under no circumstances.”

“If you don’t do it willingly, they will force your hand. You know this.”

“They can do what they want with me.”

Fedin walks to the window overlooking the garden. A few reporters have returned. He slicks his hand over his widow’s peak. “You know what they can…I lived through it as well. As a friend—”

“But remember, you are not here as my friend,” Boris interrupts. “So what are you here as, exactly?”

“A fellow writer. A citizen.”

Boris lowers himself to his bed, the simple metal frame creaking under his weight. “Which is it? A writer or a citizen?”

“I am both. And you are as well.”