After Love (12 page)

Papa paused, then his face lightened. ‘The
taiga
summers are short but breathtaking. The days are long and warm and stars appear in cloudless skies for an hour or two, then disappear. The world comes to life in a flash, as if rushing to realise what is expected of it: flowers, fruit, everything flourishes. It doesn't matter that autumn is just a few weeks away. Summer even transforms the way people in the
taiga
speak. No one mumbles any more, or whispers. Words come out full, loud and resonant, wanting to be heard.

‘One summer I took the boat from Yakutsk and sailed to the sprawling delta at the icy mouth of the Arctic Sea. To help a geophysical survey, was my excuse. Luckily no one bothered to check. The following summer I got the opportunity to make a short trip in search of where Maria's wonderful Lena begins its journey. A few kilometres north of Lake Baikal, hidden in the ranges, is a small lake, perfectly round. It's about sixteen hundred metres above sea level. There the Lena appears through a narrow crevice, a stream less than a metre wide and only a metre or so deep. I walked downstream for ten kilometres as it widened to five or six metres and flowed fast and noisily like a little girl who has just learnt to run, feet thumping on the ground – much like little Anna, I thought, a bit wobbly, unsure where and how to stop.

‘I remember the trip to the delta that summer not simply because it was so incredibly beautiful, but also because on my return I found a small parcel waiting for me at the cabin. It didn't have a return address and I didn't recognise the writing. It contained a white bag tied with red ribbon, wrapped in three layers of brown paper. In the bag were a pair each of socks and gloves, which I instantly recognised, plus a sheet of folded paper ripped from a school notebook. I unfolded the sheet and a photo fell out.'

Papa got up from his chair and walked slowly out of the room, his lit cigarette in his hand. We heard him in his room, coughing then swearing.

‘He must have bumped against the bed,' I whispered to Vasu. ‘He often does that.'

Papa reappeared with a tiny black-and-white photo which he handed to me. In it, two women sat on a bench and, standing against its curved back, stood a little girl with a ponytail. She leant against the younger woman, her right hand clutching the collar of her coat. The other woman's hand touched the girl's shoulder. Only the girl smiled. ‘I've seen this photo,' I suddenly remembered, went into my room and brought an album, opened it and pulled out a picture. The three of us looked at the two photos and discovered that they were slightly different: the same three figures but in different positions. The two women had swapped places in the second photo, and the little girl with the ponytail wasn't sitting but standing on the bench. The girl with the ponytail was of course me, and the woman next to Aunty Olga was Tonya. And there was one more difference between the two photos. In Papa's photo, the bench near the right leg of the little girl was stained.

‘I used to carry it everywhere in my pocket,' he said. ‘Once when I was making my way across a rope bridge, I slipped and fell. Something sharp, a rock or a twig, must have pierced my skin. I noticed the blood only when I returned home that night.'

10 July 1952
, the back of the photo read.

‘You must just have celebrated your second birthday,' he said. Then he went on with the story. ‘I received three more parcels in the next two years. Later Aunty Olga explained to me the complicated route they travelled before reaching me. It took Tonya and Olga several years to find this safe way of sending the parcels. First they mailed them to Leningrad. A contact there repacked them and posted them to an address in Sverdlovsk, from where they were dispatched to Irkutsk to begin their short trip to me.

‘The day I received the parcel with the photo I planted a young birch in the front garden, not far from the wooden gate. Maria and Ded Zakhar warned me that it wouldn't survive, but promised to help me look after it anyway. They were wrong. It began to grow, hesitantly at first. Once it rooted, it burst into leaf as if touched by the benevolent hand of a magician who wanted to spread hope and joy.
Be patient
, the little tree seemed to be telling me,
your time will come. Wait and hope, hope and dream, and let your dreams nurture new hope.

On 6 March 1953, the day we were told about the death of the Great Leader, that day the radio never stopped playing Tchaikovsky's
Pathétique
, Maria and I, watched by a sceptical Ded Zakhar, erected a small wooden bench near the tree. “To sit one day in the blessed shade of the beautiful tree,” Maria pronounced.'

‘Paul Robeson had come to Moscow in December 1952, to receive the Stalin Peace Prize. That was on the seventy-third birthday of the Great Leader. “The standard-bearer of the oppressed”, Robeson was called, “a fighter for the freedom of the Negroes, a beacon for honest Americans struggling against the might of imperialist reactionaries planning a treacherous war against Communists”. His concert in Moscow was transmitted live on radio. I'll always remember his final song. It was the Song of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, in Yiddish. But you know what? In later broadcasts that song was left out. It wasn't very hard to guess why. I don't know what to make of Paul Robeson. I loved his voice, his songs and his kind face. But they say that in 1953 he wrote a touching tribute to our Beloved Comrade. We all have our blind spots. There were many like him who wrote such things after our Great Leader's departure.

‘Freedom! I hate and love this word so much. It was returned to me as suddenly as it had been stolen on that cold winter evening in Moscow. When I think about it now, it seems I'd already begun to see its smiling face in my dreams, feel its touch, kiss its wonderful lips and hear it call me Papa. It was winter again, the last week of February 1955, when Nikolai, the young geologist heading the exploration party, knocked on my door. He pulled a bottle of vodka from his rucksack, asked for two glasses, opened a tin of salted cucumbers and called: “Let's drink to your freedom, Leonid Mikhailovich.” We drank together and talked about everything: music, geology, surveys, and my book on the application of geophysical methods in the permafrost. He was a kind man who loved poetry and sang ballads to the music of his guitar.

‘Maria too knocked on the door that evening. “Ded Zakhar is poorly and I have come to check on him,” she told me. She noticed the vodka bottle and the opened tin of cucumbers on the table, and I showed her the official paper. “To be freed at once and rehabilitated,” she read aloud and smiled.

‘She hurried off and came back with all sorts of good things. In no time at all a bright yellow tablecloth was spread on the table, a bottle of wine opened, a big round loaf of rye bread sliced, a plate of salad arranged, and the party began. Nikolai played the guitar and Maria sang. After a drink or two, we all began to dance. Maria let down her hair and it shone as she swayed in the flickering light of the stove, as her scarf swung and her skirt swirled.

‘I don't remember falling asleep but when I woke I found myself in bed. Through the half-open door I saw Maria and Nikolai on the floor sleeping together. The blanket over Maria had slipped, revealing her beautiful back. It glowed like a painting forcing me to look. I felt free and happy, and then, without making noise, I crept out.

The full moon was just slipping below the horizon. I sat for a few minutes on the bench near the birch tree that I had begun to call Annushka. Then I opened the gate and walked to the frozen lake where snow swirled. I heard from beneath the ice the trickle of water, soft but clear like a flicker of hope in a dream. If sunlight could make a sound, it would be that sound.'

Papa hadn't left Tatyur immediately. He had waited for winter to pass, for the ice to thaw and for spring to show its bare feet.

‘I wanted to live through another winter there,' he said. ‘Perhaps I wasn't sure that the words typed on the paper were real, although they were stamped and properly signed. Perhaps I had lost confidence in the goodness of people; perhaps the snake of doubt had entered my heart and left its poison there; perhaps I was frightened to go back in case I discovered that in my absence everything had changed. Perhaps I had found the measure of my own insignificance in the great scheme of things.'

A few weeks after the first ice floes began to move, Papa decided to pack his bags and prepare for his departure. He went to Yakutsk to say goodbye to his friends, taking a wood-saw as a present for Maria's carpenter son. For the little girl who had been curious about the fish frozen in the ice, he found some amber he had received in one of the parcels from Leningrad. For Ded Zakhar, he managed to extract a packet of dry imported tobacco from his biologist friend. But he couldn't decide on anything to give Maria. Nothing felt right. But then in a window he saw a pair of beautiful bright red leather boots. Luckily they fitted her perfectly.

Before he boarded the truck to Yakutsk, they sat together for a while on the bench near the birch, holding hands.

‘Don't worry, dear professor,' Maria told Papa, ‘I'll look after your tree. Now just get up and go—and don't turn and look back. Do you hear? Go, my dear man. May God be with you.'

Vasu

I didn't have the courage to go to Anna's apartment after her father told us the story of his exile. She left messages with the secretary of my department and with the woman on duty at the hostel, but I didn't return her calls. I wanted to talk to her but I couldn't. Did I feel guilty about her father? I don't know. But I did write a long letter to Uncle Triple K soon after, telling him about the sad life of Leonid Mikhailovich. I wanted him to write back and explain why we humans fear each other so much. Is it because we know that like all machines we too will break down, that the tendency to fail is engrained in the very nature of things born or made, and that the potential for failure is always there?

We fear that our neighbour who knocked on our door to borrow a torch at night; who came and congratulated us on the birth of our children and grandchildren; who willingly shared with us his bread and salt, honey and water, milk and mangoes; who used to walk with us to the bus stop every day, will one day break into our home and attack us.

We fear that to save his own life our neighbour will agree to spy on us, to fabricate evidence, to spread rumours, to bear witness against us and incriminate us. Unfortunately the seeds of our failure to trust our own ability and the ability of those around us to remain true to our humanity are spread as soon as we become conscious of our presence in the world.

We fear others because we know that they, like us, are weak and prone to failure. We fear that we'll lose control and hurt or even kill people. We are our own worst enemies

I wrote to Uncle Triple K about my professor, Asiya, who taught a course on the history of cities. Her lectures were like stories, illustrated with wonderful images, and she rarely used notes. An overhead projector would beam an image on the screen and she would begin to weave her stories around it.

She once invited me to dinner. There I met her younger sister Rukhaiya. Asiya and Rukhaiya were both born in a Siberian village, lost their parents when they were little, and were brought up in an orphanage named after Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the KGB. Asiya used to be the secretary of the Party branch at the university.

‘Did you know about Stalin and the camps?' I had asked them.

‘Yes,' they replied. ‘Most of us knew. It was hard not to know, but harder still for us to do anything. Everyone was terrified. Now it's different.'

‘Is it really different?' I asked.

‘Of course,' Rukhaiya said. ‘Now if you speak out, you don't lose you life. They just come and scare you a little. Those closed trials serve the same purpose.'

‘After Khrushchev's famous speech,' Asiya insisted, ‘things have definitely changed. People want to know more. And they
do
know more.'

I read my letter to Uncle Triple K a number of times and put it away, unable to decide if I should mail it to him. It sounded contrived, apologetic, hollow.

The following afternoon I spotted Leonid Mikhailovich in the university café. He had come to attend a meeting. He asked me to join him.

‘Thanks for
Ella and Louis
,' he said. Then he told me that he needed my help to translate an English article into Russian. He asked me to come to the apartment one evening and work with him. He also wanted me to know that Anna was worried about me and that I should call her.

‘You love her, don't you?' he said.

Then suddenly he began talking about his ex-student, the young female interrogator who had made him sign his ‘confession'.

A year after his return from Yakutsk, this young woman had come to see him. He didn't know how she had found his address, but it wouldn't have been hard, since after all she worked for the KGB.

She introduced herself as Nadezhda Golubkina. Fortunately Aunty Olga wasn't home, because she would have definitely sent her packing.

His student asked him if she could come in, and Leonid Mikhailovich let her pass through the door. She walked into the study and waited to be asked to sit down. He took her things, placed them on a chair and remained standing.

She opened her bag and took out a record wrapped in cellophane. Since she knew how much he loved jazz, she said, she had brought him this old recording of Utyosov's songs. She said that she was going back to the university, not in Moscow but in Leningrad, and she would try and finish her degree in physics. She was three months pregnant, she confided, and because she was soon going to be a mother she had decided to come and see him.

Leonid Mikhailovich didn't say anything, fearing that he might embarrass or humiliate her in some way.

And then she uttered the words she had come to say: ‘I'm sorry.'

‘I know,' he replied. But he didn't want the meeting to continue, so he told her he was seeing a friend. ‘But so nice of you to come. And thanks for the record.'