After Love (13 page)

She rose, put on her coat and hat and left without another word. He stood at the window watching her walk away. She stopped and looked up and he thought she might come back, but then she started walking again, turned the corner and disappeared.

Of course he was meeting no one. He had lied, probably because he didn't want her to tell more lies and further demean herself.

Leonid Mikhailovich finished the story, opened his bag and started looking for something. He pulled out a photocopy of an article from an English magazine, handed it to me and said he would be interested to hear what I thought of it.

It was a short article of just three pages, one with a photo of King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band in Chicago in 1923. Third from the left was Louis Armstrong, standing next to King Oliver.

Part Two

There never really was a ‘we' or ‘ours'

Derek Walcott,
White Egrets

Letters from Kabani

Anna

A letter has arrived from Vasu, in India on a field trip. He had wanted me to go with him, but I couldn't drop my work just like that. He didn't understand how hard it was for us to get a passport to travel abroad.

‘They won't let me leave the country so easily,' I explained. ‘Yes, not even if we are married.' In fact getting married wasn't going to be simple either.

In his letter he wrote about the River Kabani. ‘Just as your Papa has his Lena, I too have a river of my own. It starts as a trickle from a high mountain lake, gushes through narrow ravines, cascades over waterfalls, then slows to a more sedate flow as it reaches the foothills covered with lush forest.'

He enclosed a map and a postcard. The map showed three large rivers, and I guessed that the tiny blue curve joining the majestic Cauvery was Vasu's Kabani.

The postcard showed the Nilgiris, the Blue Mountains of the Western Ghats. ‘Like all mountains, they appear blue from a distance because of the haze caused by moisture, dust and tiny globules of oil,' he wrote on the back. ‘But the Nilgiris' blue comes also from a plant called
neelkurunji
, which flowers every twelve years and creates a blue carpet across the slopes. The elephants roaming the
shola
forests eat both the grass and the flowers, then turn into giant, harmless drunks. The ground shakes as they walk and when they mount the females, they must feel light and lost like autumn clouds.'

Sergei, drinking coffee with me, picked up the card, read it and began to laugh. I shouldn't have agreed to meet him, but he had been so insistent. I suspected that things weren't going well with Galya, she who had promised him babies. Sergei looked seedy and I took pity on him. I had picked up Vasu's letter from one of his Indian friends, who had collected it from the Indian High Commission. The students used the diplomatic bag to send and receive their letters, not because they were secret, but because the service was cheap and fast.

Sergei and I had run into one another on the escalator in the Metro. I tried to avoid him but as I left the station to catch my bus, he had called out and caught me up.

‘You look terrible,' I greeted him. We sat in a café talking about his work, Aunty Olga and Papa. He said he had heard rumours that Papa might be getting a big prize and a medal. He told me he had read a review of one of our string quartet's concerts.

‘Why don't you give up archaeology and concentrate on your music?' he asked.

I didn't reply, and let him talk. Galya was not even mentioned

He noticed my disinterest, which must have hurt him. To hurt me back he said: ‘I hear you are going out with a foreigner.'

‘I'm living with him,' I wanted to say, but his sneer stopped me. That's when, to avoid his gaze, I opened my handbag and the postcard fell out. He grabbed it and began to read. And laugh.

‘How interesting. An Indian. Do you love him?'

‘That's none of your business,' I replied.

‘Oh yes it is. You know I still care about you.'

‘I don't want you to care about me. I can look after myself.'

‘I know you can,' he said, and paused. ‘But you want to escape, don't you? This is a dangerous game you're playing.'

‘Stop it,' I whispered. ‘Not one more word.'

‘You'll get hurt. I know you will.' The mocking smile on his face enraged me. I picked up my coffee, wanting to throw the cup at him. Luckily I didn't. I just pushed back my chair and walked off.

I was glad he didn't follow me.

I decided to take a long walk, just to calm down, and soon found myself near a cinema. I bought a ticket and went in. The newsreel had just finished and when the main film began, I was astounded that it was none other than
The Cranes are Flying
. I sat through most of it in a kind of shock, unable to work out if this was just a coincidence. I left the cinema before it ended.

Aunty Olga was sitting on a bench outside the apartment, waiting for me. I had pleaded with her many times to stop doing this but she wouldn't listen. ‘It's such a beautiful evening,' she said, and she was right. It was bright and unusually breezy. I sat with her for a few moments and told her about the film.

‘Samoilova has put on weight,' she said, ‘and doesn't look so pretty any more. Just a few weeks ago I saw her in a play. We all get old, don't we?'

I was pleased that she didn't take the opportunity of reminding me how beautiful Tonya had been.

‘Let's go home,' she said. She put her arm in mine. Just as we were about to mount the stairs, a girl ran past, crying. Aunty Olga pulled her arm away, turned round to look, slipped and fell.

It wasn't until later that night that we found she had broken her right wrist.

Vasu

The day after I arrived back in Kalpetta it began to rain, and it rained on alternate days after that. But the rain didn't hinder my work. I went to meet Comrade KPS, the Chairman of the Board of the Co-operative, whose proper name was K.P.S. Nair. He told me that he had been working with the coffee farmers of the area for more than thirty years, and was one of five founding members of the Co-operative. He also held a position of some influence on the Executive Committee of the Communist Party, which ruled the state.

Comrade KPS wanted the design of the village to be attractive as well as functional, a model for other state-run co-operatives. Two young surveyors helped me prepare a good topographic map of the site, with details and contour lines. I had been assigned a field assistant, an old man called Kody. ‘His job is to look after you,' Comrade KPS explained to me in his office. ‘He'll show you the hills, the coffee and pepper gardens, and keep the elephants and monkeys and snakes away.'

I was expecting the village to be built on one of the terraces of the River Kabani, but the state government, I was told, didn't want to give up prime land close to the river and the main road, so the site had been moved a few kilometres upstream of a creek which joins the river near the town of Kakanakote. The stream flows from east to west and its northern bank is higher than the southern.

I had been here for three weeks and had missed Anna every minute of them. At times I missed her so much that it hurt. During the day I was busy and the feeling of her absence retreated into the background, but in the evenings sitting alone in my room I felt miserable.

The other night I woke up startled that I had clearly seen her sitting in the chair next to my bed. Of course, she wasn't there. It was a dream in which she sat gazing at me like Aunty Olga's
Bogomateri
.

Anna would have laughed at me, I'm sure, if I told her that I carried two watches. The one she gave me last year for my birthday still showed the time in Moscow so I could keep in tune with the rhythms of her life. The Budapest scarf, which she had lent me, was folded under my pillow. Perhaps that is why she was always part of my dreams, each leaving a trace of her presence for me to carry throughout the day.

One night when it was raining yet again, I lay in bed hoping to hear the sound of her cello. I waited, then frustrated by my failure to imagine it, I walked out to the balcony. For a brief moment the rain stopped and the clouds vanished, opening up a patch of starry night, moist, fragrant and mysteriously silent. Not a leaf stirred. The street was empty but for a monkey sitting under the dim light of a lamppost like a figure in an absurdist painting. At the other side a man squatted at his tea-stall, coughing insistently, his stove glowing bright red and yellow against the darkness.

I stood on the balcony waiting for something that seemed about to happen. When the silence became unbearable I turned to go inside. Suddenly there was a heavy downpour. I looked out again. The monkey hopped about then sat still, stuck in the painting. The tea-stall man turned his face up towards the balcony.

I went inside, made myself a cup of tea and drank it there, enjoying the silence that followed the downpour.

Anna

Aunty Olga's wrist and right arm were put in plaster. Although she wanted to return to Kiev, Papa convinced her that she should stay in Moscow. ‘Annushka will look after you,' he promised. But he didn't know how hard it was to please his ‘angel of a sister'.

Meanwhile letters from Vasu kept coming and coming. When did he find the time to write at such length? Clearly he was lonely. There was no question of my writing back as frequently as he expected or desired, let alone as charmingly as he did, as if trying to impress me.

He wrote that he missed my cello. Before he left for India I had been rehearsing French ‘songs without words' which we wanted to include in one of our concerts. His favourite was Ravel's
Kaddish
, which he would make me play again and again. His take on music is rather naïve and all my attempts to make him appreciate Faure's
Tristesse
and Massenet's
Elégie
have failed.

Then suddenly one day Vasu's friend Vladimir phoned, wanting to know when he would be back. We started talking and out of the blue he invited me to accompany him to a live reading of Isaac Babel's story
The Widow
. I knew the story, and although I didn't particularly like it, I agreed. He said he would send us two tickets to the opening night of the play
Dialogues with Socrates
at the Mayakovsky Drama Theatre. He was playing one of his small roles.

Papa and I went to the play together. It dramatised the trial of Socrates and his execution. Vladimir played the leader of the chorus. The Armenian actor who played Socrates looked and sounded remarkably as I imagined he would. In the final scene Socrates ascended the stone steps of a Greek theatre, his head encircled with a halo like a god, and disappeared into the darkness.

This ending spoiled the play for me. There was no need to make an immortal hero out of him.

As usual after it finished the whole cast came out onstage. The director stood with them and they all bowed while the audience applauded. Then the director waved at someone in the wings and the playwright, a short man with a big smiling face, joined them. The applause began again. A young woman ran on, handed the author a bouquet of red roses, kissed him on the lips and disappeared.

As the actors began to move off the audience remained standing, as if waiting for something more to happen. The playwright raised his hand, waved the bouquet and a spotlight flashed through the hall, coming to rest on a man in the second row of the dress circle. He stood and bowed. He was tall and thin and stooped, with patches of grey hair around a bald head. He wore a grey suit which fit rather badly and a long thin red tie. Although he was smiling, he was clearly feeling awkward.

The playwright led the applause. ‘Who's that?' I whispered. ‘Sakharov,' Papa said. Someone in the audience shouted
Bravo!
More voices joined in and soon the hall was filled with loud applause.

Sakharov waved and began to clap back.

‘Sakharov is our Socrates,' Papa said as we left the theatre.

Vasu

In the middle of July I suddenly came down with malaria. As a result I lost two whole weeks of work. I should have been more careful. How would I tell Anna I would have to extend my stay?

Two weeks after the illness I went out of my hotel room to take a short walk. It hurt to move, but Kody assured me that I wasn't looking too bad and that in a week or so I would recover fully. But the parasite, he warned me, would never leave my body but live in it like a stubborn tenant, feeding on my juices and announcing its presence with fevers when the seasons changed. Taking quinine each year would merely tame it, never destroy it completely.

Malaria is a strange illness. The cycles of sudden coldness followed by high fever and sweating, last for four to six hours. Fortunately they only occur every other day. On the days when the fever showed mercy and left me alone, I was able to do some work. I completed three different versions of a plan for the village and sketched huts for two-, four- and six-member families. The designs for the cultural centre and the administrative block were finished. Comrade KPS was going to hire an architect to work on the details and an engineer would choose ‘Green' building material. I told Comrade KPS that I was interested in building a bio-gas plant running on organic waste because such plants had the capacity to generate close to seventy per cent of the power needed for the village.

In my plan the huts were located on either side of the stream, in rows angled towards the water. The banks sloped upstream and I was going to use the rising elevation to site the huts on terraces so one did not obstruct another's views. There would be space both front and back so that from a bird's-eye view, they would appear like black and white squares on a chessboard.

The number of huts in each row would decrease as you moved upstream, creating a pattern resembling a leaf of a coffee plant, with the stream forming its midrib. Anyone entering the village would clearly see its leaf-like shape.