The Secrets We Kept(97)
I also thought of him leaving my bed after I’d begged him to stay. I thought about pulling in to the train station after my three years at Potma—how, when I saw he hadn’t come, I felt like turning around and going back. I thought of the many times he told me it was over and the many terrible things I said to him in response. I thought of his oversized ego in his prime, and the diminished man Zhivago had left behind.
* * *
—
They dressed him in his favorite gray suit and laid him in a box of virgin pine. I waited outside his dacha while Panikhida was offered inside. The great pianist Sviatoslav Teofilovich Richter played in Boris’s music room, his notes drifting out the open window.
The music ended and they carried his coffin out and paused near his beloved garden. I stood beside Borya, opposite Zinaida: his widow and his almost widow. I wailed, and Ira and Mitya held me up by my arms. But Zinaida stood there, silently, with grace.
The procession filed down the hill and up to the cemetery to the grave site Borya had picked out for himself, under three tall pines. His death notice in the newspaper was but a line or two, and yet they came. Hundreds, maybe thousands, followed the coffin. They were old and young, neighbors and strangers, workers and students, peers and adversaries, factory workers and secret police dressed as factory workers, foreign correspondents and Muscovite reporters. All had gathered around Borya’s final resting place; the one thing they had in common was that they’d all been changed by his words.
They made speeches and recited prayers, and I stared into the open coffin, which was covered in wreaths and branches from lilac and apple trees. From the back, a young man cried out, reciting the closing stanza to Borya’s poem “Hamlet”:
But the plan of action is determined,
And the end irrevocably sealed.
I am alone; all round me drowns in falsehood:
Life is not a walk across a field.
By the last line, others had joined in. Then a man announced, with booming authority, that the funeral was over. “This demonstration is undesirable,” he said, and motioned for two men to bring forth the coffin’s lid. I pushed my way to the front of the crowd and kissed Borya’s face one last time. I was moved aside and the lid was secured. People protested the abrupt ending but were silenced by the sound of hammers driving nails into wood. Each crack of the hammer made me shiver, and I pulled my coat tighter.
As they lowered his coffin into the earth, chants of “Glory to Pasternak!” rose up and carried across the crowd. I was reminded of the first time I first saw him read so many years ago, when his fans could not stop themselves from finishing his poems before he did. How I sat in the balcony, hoping he could see me through the bright lights. How he did see me, and how my world was forever changed.
I wouldn’t see Zinaida again after the funeral. She did her best to erase me from his history, and her family took on the same cause after her death. I fought it for years. But could I blame them? I knew what they called me, what rumors persisted. And even if I was forever branded an adulteress, a seducer, a woman after money and power, a homewrecker, a spy, I was content knowing at least Lara would survive me.
* * *
On the morning they came for me for a second time, two and a half months after Borya’s death, I was sitting in my dark kitchen sipping tea. I’d brewed it too bitter for the third day in a row.
I heard the slow churn of gravel under tires, and I didn’t need to get up to know a black car was making its way down my drive.
I finished my tea and put the cup and saucer in the sink. I thought of Ira, still asleep in her bedroom—how she would later see the teacup with a brown ring and have to wash it, knowing it was mine, and that I was gone.
The sound of car doors opening and closing set me in motion. I went to Mitya’s room first, but saw his bed was empty. “He didn’t come home last night,” Ira said, startling me from behind. She went to the window above Mitya’s desk. “There are two cars now.”
I watched as four men leaned against their cars, smoking and chatting nonchalantly, as if waiting for their girlfriends. I watched as one put out a cigarette in one of my flowerpots and another washed his hands in my birdbath. I closed the curtains and went to the telephone. “Get dressed,” I said. Ira left the room.
Dialing Mama’s number, my hands trembled terribly. “Mama?”
“Are they there?”
“Yes. Are they there too?”
“Yes.”
“They are just trying to intimidate us again. You have nothing to worry about.”
Ira emerged, dressed in her most conservative outfit: a long beige skirt and matching jacket. “Is Mitya at Babushka’s?” she asked.
“Is Mitya there?” I asked Mama.
“He came last night. Drunk again. He’s too young to drink like he does—”
“Mama.”
“He’s up now. I told him to stay put.”
“Good. Keep him there.”
Three hard knocks on the front door shook the floorboards. Ira grabbed my arm. “I have to go, Mama.”
I walked to the entryway with Ira holding my arm like a small child. A man wearing an expensive-looking trench coat cut through the four men in the cheap black suits, leaving muddy tracks across my grandfather’s Akstafa rug. “We finally meet.”