After Love (10 page)

‘Has it changed you?' Papa asked.

‘I suppose so,' Vasu said. ‘Before I came here someone gave me
Doctor Zhivago
. After I read it I couldn't stop thinking about Russia.'

We watched his face as he spoke. His Russian was good and his slight accent made the words – and him – even more attractive.

Aunty Olga sat back in her chair, impressed.

‘What I liked most was the description of the changing seasons,' Vasu continued. ‘In India they tend to come and go unnoticed. Here the change is so swift and intense.'

‘But I love sun and heat,' I said, to tease him. ‘Winter is depressing.'

‘What a liar,' Aunty Olga interjected. ‘You should read Prishvin and Paustovsky,' she said to Vasu in her typical teacher's voice.

But he turned to Papa and asked about the
taiga
, the Siberian forest. ‘Yes, the
taiga
is breathtakingly beautiful, but treacherous,' Papa said. It was a subject dear to his heart. Then he began the tale Aunty Olga and I had heard many times before, about the time he had spent working in the
taiga
supervising exploration for gold, diamonds and gas. ‘A young couple used to work for me,' he said. ‘Their job was to find the diamonds trapped in ancient volcanoes. They were in love and did everything together. The girl told me they wanted to save money to get married and their youthful exuberance cheered everyone up. But one day out among the trees a hungry bear attacked and killed them. It was a tragedy! I was asked to identify the bodies and couldn't stop cursing myself. I shouldn't have let them go out so far on their own. I felt terribly guilty; I still do. They were so young. Look at me, old and useless and unscathed. But I shouldn't complain. It's good to be alive, even if I do feel such guilt and shame.'

He paused for a moment, took off his glasses, wiped them with his napkin and said: ‘I've got some photos of them somewhere.' He got up and went into his room. We all noticed the slight limp in his walk.

‘
Voina
(war),' Aunty Olga sighed. ‘I'll bring you some fresh coffee,' she said and disappeared into the kitchen.

Papa returned with a box of colour slides. He set up his little projector on the table and arranged a white screen against the wall near the piano. Then he turned off the lights, ignoring Aunty Olga's ‘It's getting late, Leynya.'

As he adjusted the focus on the first slide, he cleared his throat and started his story. Papa talked and talked and when he finally finished showing us slide after slide of his life on the sweeping
taiga
it was too late for Vasu to get back to his room in the hostel.

Midway through the show, Aunty Olga had left the room. She came back to say that she had made Vasu a bed in her room. Vasu started to object, but I told him to stop. Arguing with Aunty Olga would get him nowhere. ‘She'll sleep in my room, on the camp bed,' I whispered. ‘You should be pleased. She likes you.'

Vasu

Anna seemed to think that Aunty Olga liked me. I'm not sure. Actually she terrified me, especially that look which would come into her eyes.

‘You're so much like Papa, her dear Leynya,' Anna would often remind me. ‘Slow and steady, unsure but reliable.'

That night I couldn't sleep. Nor could Leonid Mikhailovich, Anna's father. I heard him playing
Ella and Louis
softly in the library, over and over again. He was recording some of the songs for a friend, he would explain later.

I lay listening to Aunty Olga and Anna talking quietly in the next room. Their whispers reminded me of water trickling from melting snow.

I felt out of place. ‘You shouldn't still be here,' a voice inside me insisted.

Aunty Olga's room was hot and stuffy. I got up, opened the window and stood looking out. The wind was blowing strongly and in the courtyard a red ribbon swirled and whirled across uneven mounds of snow. I heard a glassy rattle and saw an empty vodka bottle roll and slide along a bench. I waited for it to fall off, but it continually rolled to the edge and then back. I waited and waited until I was so cold I shut the window and returned to the warm bed.

I stared at the roof and tried to focus on the treacherous beauty of the
taiga
, a thought that had started to form slowly in my mind. But my eyes led me to a corner of the ceiling where a small piece of wallpaper had peeled off. The thought disappeared. On the bookshelf a small icon of
Bogomateri
(Our Lady) glowed, its eyes reminding me of Jijee-ma.

Suddenly the door opened and Anna walked in. She took off her nightshirt, flung it on a chair and slipped into bed with me.

‘I just want to lie beside you,' she whispered. ‘We can't make love, not with Aunty Olga sleeping on the other side of that thin wall.'

She turned on her side and pulled me close so that her head rested on my left arm. My right stretched across her body.

‘What are you thinking?' she asked.

‘About silk,' I replied. ‘And water.'

‘Silk and water,' she whispered, ‘milk and honey, and the sweet smell of freshly-baked bread.' She looked at me. ‘Tell me about your mother who died giving birth to you.'

I told her about my mother in her sky-blue
dupatta
. I told her that my sister had a sky-blue wrap scattered with silver stars and that when she came to put me to bed she would cover me with the wrap and assure me that it would entice the starry sky to send me sweet dreams.

‘Why would the sky be so benevolent?' Anna asked.

My sister and I had a favourite star, I told her, neither the brightest nor the biggest, but the one which shone with a steady light. That star, Jijee-ma told me, was where Amma, our mother, had gone to live. From there she watched over us.

‘Is that why you call me “my sky-blue
dupatta
”?' Anna asked, and laughed.

‘What about
your
mother?' I asked. ‘Tonya: that's a beautiful name.'

‘Her full name was Antonina,' she said. ‘And she was even more beautiful than her name – not an ugly duckling like me.'

Then she kissed my hand and went to sleep.

In the morning she wasn't in my bed. I looked around the room and found her nightshirt on the floor.

Strange Fruit

Anna

When I saw Papa and Vasu together that night, I was surprised how similar they were.

‘Of course,' said Aunty Olga. ‘It isn't easy to love them,' she added.

Vasu told me how much he liked our apartment. ‘Because it overwhelms me with silence,' he explained. He's right. I'm glad he doesn't find the silence oppressive. Sergei hated it. ‘You live inside a grave,' he used to complain.

We don't have a television and the radio is invariably turned off. When it's on, it plays only music. The apartment is our refuge from the outside world. We don't let it inside but leave it at the door with our coats and parkas. We aren't unusual. There are many like us who have decided to live a double life, one for the outside world and another only for us.

We love music. It lives in every nook and cranny of our home. We cherish our trusted Estonia piano which fits snugly into the library. It is old, scratched and stained but, like Papa and Aunty Olga, has survived the War and all the other upheavals.

I know my mother used to play it. ‘She played badly,' Aunty Olga often says, ‘but had a decent voice.' She used to sing to Papa's piano accompaniment. Now he does the same for me on my cello. Sometimes I improvise, following his jazz tunes. We have never talked seriously about his love for jazz.

But Vasu is very curious about Papa's jazz. His insistence to know everything about us irritates me. Like Papa, he wants to get to the bottom of everything.

The other night I saw them talking in the library. It was hot and humid and I couldn't sleep, so I had gone to the kitchen to have a drink. As I returned with a bottle of water I saw Papa at the piano and Vasu sitting on the floor leaning against the wall. They saw me and grinned, the guilty smile of naughty kids.

‘
Duschno
(It's stuffy),' Papa said and asked me for some water. He took a swig from the bottle and invited me to join them. Reluctantly I obliged.

‘Vasu thinks it unusual for a Russian like me to enjoy jazz,' began Papa.

‘But you aren't a typical Russian, are you?' I said, surprised at the irritation in my voice.

‘I fell in love with jazz in America,' he continued, ignoring my prickly interjection. ‘I was twenty-five then and had spent a year at the famous School of Mines where Stalin sent me to study. He hoped I would learn the secrets of the greedy capitalists. On the way back home I stopped in Kansas City for three days and it was there I heard Count Basie's orchestra at the Reno Club. What a place it was! A dingy sort of building with a whorehouse on the second floor. You bought your hamburger or hot dog, a glass of local or imported whisky, and watched the band in a room packed with people, noisy and musty with sweat and smoke. You had to pay extra for a seat close to the band. Listening to Count Basie's piano made me jumpy. I wanted to get up onto the stage and play myself. Of course I didn't.

‘I still remember the saxophonist Lester Young and his beautiful sax. There's nothing as fine as a tenor sax. I don't know why people like trumpeters so much. Maybe because most of them sing as well? I can't imagine anything more exciting than Lester Young pouring his soul into the brassy body of his sax. I'll give up the piano, I used to tell myself, but Count Basie's whispering tones reassured me. He was short and round and bent close over the keyboard. He didn't beat it like a percussion instrument, trying to rip it apart or get inside it. Instead he seemed to glide across the surface, selecting a note here and there and letting it speak. People go crazy about his
One O' Clock Jump
but I loved his
How Long How Long Blues:
nothing but piano, guitar, bass and drums. Pure rhythm and mood.'

He paused briefly. ‘I did try once or twice to play the sax – but soon found that it wouldn't work for me. I don't have the courage to stand up in front of an audience and play. The piano gives you space to hide. ‘I met a young Negro girl in a club in Kansas City. Tall, thin with a smile as bright as the full moon, and when she spoke or hummed, her voice made your whole body ripple. Josephine Taylor was her name. “Josie, you can call me, Josie Taylor,” she said after our first dance. Her grandfather was a sailor from Marseilles. She wanted to go to France and see it for herself, the best port-city in the world, so her mother had told her.

‘She didn't believe me when I said that I came from Moscow. “Bolshevik?” she asked. “Not really,” I replied. “Go to Chicago,” she told me—and took me there. I didn't see many rich and greedy Americans in the cities. Most of them looked poor and unhappy. There were beggars, whores, tramps, burglars, thieves, bootleggers and, most pitiful of the lot, the homeless. The fear of suddenly becoming poor ruled the streets. The Great American Dream seemed built on this fear. When I returned to Moscow, our Union of the Soviets didn't look so bad in comparison, even though a more deadly form of fear had taken root in our country.

‘While I was still in America I asked Josie to come with me to New York, and she agreed. We heard Jimmy Lunceford's band at the Cotton Club, but my heart had been captured by Basie's piano and everything else seemed just an imitation. Even Louis Armstrong's band at Connie's Inn didn't make a strong impression, although over time I have come to love his music.

‘We bribed the doorman to let Josie in, on condition that she would keep out of sight, but soon people at the other tables noticed her and we were told in no uncertain terms to leave. But not before we'd heard the great
Gut Bucket Blues
.'

He took a sip of water. ‘Blues – now there's an interesting English word for you. There's nothing like it in Russian. The critics say that a vocalist makes music with his or her head, throat and heart. The head determines the musicality of the sound, the throat works as an instrument, and from the heart come the emotions. Louis Armstrong got the balance right every time he sang.'

‘What happened to Josie, Papa?' I asked, handing him a cup of coffee that Vasu had been making in the kitchen. After Vasu resumed his seat on the floor, Papa finally said, slowly and hesitantly, that he didn't know. When I asked if he had ever written to her, he ignored me, got up and removed a book from the shelf. He pulled out an old postcard from Josie showing the Brooklyn Bridge. Vasu tried to read it but found the writing illegible. Most of the words were either smudged or crossed out with thick red ink.

He would later find out that Josie had written several letters to him. He saw them for the first time in the Lubyanka interrogation room. They were brief and bare and yet they and his love for jazz would tip the balance against him. He was banished to Siberia without any hope of returning.

But as he sailed from New York in the winter of 1935 his heart, as he told us that night, had been full of hope. He had truly believed that he was one of the chosen ones, and that being sent to America to study meant that he was special. Now it was his duty to return to help his people realise their cherished dream of building a free, just and classless society.

During that fortnight on the ship he planned the outlines of three books: two of them scientific and the third about jazz. He had finished the two scientific books within a few years of his return and received several awards for them, only missing out on the Stalin Prize because he wasn't a member of the Party. The book on jazz, however, remained unfinished, although he continued to collect stacks and stacks of useful material.

That evening he showed Vasu and me some of the rare items in his collection of drawings, cartoons, posters and photos. There was a picture of Malyi Kislovsky Lane, where in October 1922 Valentin Parnakh gave the first jazz concert in Russia. The picture was pinned to a cartoon sketch of Parnakh with Meyerhold, sitting at a table in Meyerhold's drama theatre. There was a 1927 coloured picture of Sidney Bechet outside the Metropol Hotel, when the famous soprano saxophonist had performed in Moscow with Tony Ladnier's band. He showed us several photos of Utyosov, the most interesting of which was a picture of the State Jazz Band of the Russian Federation performing at Sverdlov Square on 9 May 1945. Utyosov is facing the band and behind his back, just at the level of his right-hand coat-pocket, the nose and the left eye of a face is visible, the right eye hidden behind the army cap of a man standing in front of him. ‘That's me,' Papa told us, ‘and Tonya was to my left, just behind Utyosov.'