After Love (16 page)

Perhaps that's why, standing in front of the Air India office, I suddenly decided to go to Leipzig, the city of Bach. Before facing Anna I would immerse myself in music and architecture.

‘I'll sit quietly in the churches and walk around them with my notebook and sketch. I'll marvel at the light glowing through the stained glass. I'll listen to the choirs and the organs and wonder at the sounds, dense and voluminous like water but also light as a feather. And then I'll return to Moscow, and Anna will gaze at me and smile and touch me. And all my worries and apprehensions will disappear in an instant,' I tried to convince myself.

‘I've come home,' I would say to her and, warmed by this thought and her presence, I would tell her about the connection between the oval-shaped Baroque spaces and the rhythmic structure of Bach's sonatas.

‘Is that so?' she would laugh. She would kiss me and ask me to focus on buildings and spaces and leave music to the experts. Her laughter would cheer me up. With her hand on my arm I would walk through the cold forest, greedily breathing the chilly, moist, scented air.

I would forget that I had ever been unhappy in my life.

It wasn't meant to be so hard

Anna

Vasu and I got married in March. I'm glad that it's over. It was so hard to organise: papers and more papers. Luckily Shurik helped. He has contacts and knew how to pull strings and grease greedy palms. I was interviewed three times by the authorities, just to confirm that I wasn't doing it to get an exit visa.

I had been a
komsomol
my whole life. I became a member when I was young. Everyone had to. But like Papa I never joined the Party and this was what worried me most. The officials didn't trust non-members. Aunty Olga had been smart enough to join, making her life a little easier.

The wedding ceremony was brief and formal. Vasu and I had two witnesses. Vika, my friend from the music school, stood beside me and Vasu had asked Natasha to help out. Aunty Olga refused to come. ‘I'll cry like a stupid cow and spoil it,' she said. Papa arrived at the registrar's office with all his medals and stars pinned to his coat. ‘Just to convince them that you are the proud daughter of a distinguished man,' he said, ‘and to show that the marriage isn't some kind of joke or pretence.' He looked ridiculous.

Yes, that's what irritated me most, the thought that Sergei and others like him would assume that I was marrying a foreigner simply because I wanted to leave the country. I would hardly have chosen Vasu if that had been my intention. There were other much more promising possibilities. Swedish Sasha Lundberg, half-Russian, handsome, kind and ready to fall in love, would have been a much better bet. He was a violinist who had come to learn music at the Conservatorium and we had played together with Vika. I was living with Sergei then and didn't want to risk it, but I had been tempted by Sasha once or twice.

Sasha's mother was Russian and yet he seemed to hate everything Russian. This scared me. With Vasu it was just the opposite; he loved Russians and our country. Sometimes I even felt that he loved me mainly
because
I was Russian.

The ceremony at the registrar's office was followed by an intimate party at Shurik's
dacha
. Vladimir sang and Tamrico played her guitar. Aunty Olga's present was a little gold necklace from which hung a Siberian sapphire. It had been my mother's, a wedding present from Papa. We had invited Tetya Shura but she couldn't make it because she was in hospital after a mild heart attack. She sent a tape-recorded message.

Papa had bought us tickets for a cruise along the Volga to Astrakhan. He wanted me to show Vasu his and Aunty Olga's village. But because of Vasu's asthma, we didn't get further than Kazan. One evening as we were returning from a sketching trip he had a severe attack. I didn't know how to deal with it and the train trip back to Moscow was terrible, since he couldn't sleep or even lie down. He sat on his bunk the whole night, his body squeezed in, his shoulders bent forward, his breath coming in short hard bursts from his jammed lungs. Poor thing! He needed to learn to look after himself better, to avoid dust, perfume and sudden changes in temperature.

The day I returned from our shortened honeymoon I gathered all my perfume and fragrant ointments and creams and got rid of them. Now, I thought, he would have to learn to live with my natural smells, good or bad. That was it. His fault.

Vasu

I felt guilty and ashamed that I caused our honeymoon to end so miserably.

But I was relieved that the wedding was out of the way. It had been such a huge hassle. I hated all the paperwork and the humiliation of being interrogated and examined as if I were about to commit a crime. The worst obstacle was the cultural secretary at the Indian High Commission who invited me to dinner at his house.

He was a professional diplomat, a loyal government official of the Indian Foreign Service and reminded me that he was just doing his job, following orders and normal procedures. His main intention was, he said, to ascertain if I had thought carefully about the marriage and was aware of the consequences that might directly or indirectly result from it.

Over dinner we talked of everything but politics. His wife, he said, was a doctor and their two children, a boy and a girl, attended the International School but were learning Russian. The little girl wanted to be ‘a Russian ballerina'.

His shelves were stacked with Tagore's books and there were records as well. I told them that on a trip to Tashkent, I had bumped into an old lady who had met our great Indian poet in Moscow and had the honour of presenting him with a bouquet. She had been just seven then but still remembered his long grey beard and saintly smile.

The formal part of the dinner-meeting took place in his well-furnished drawing room, where he sat at a desk with a Cuban cigar in his mouth. He offered me one and was strangely surprised that I didn't smoke. I told him about my asthma. Promptly he put his cigar out.

The major issue facing me, according to him, was that he knew from many previous cases that marriages like the one I was about to enter often went horribly wrong. Like the good lawyer he was, he listed possible problems, all of which were based on the undeniable fact that Anna was Russian. Did she speak Hindi or English? he asked me. When I shook my head, he looked serious. ‘You see, this will be a great problem. It will make her life very, very difficult.' In addition, because she was a
komsomol
, a member of the Communist youth league, she would automatically become an object of interest for Indian authorities. ‘The Soviets won't let her go without a written or unwritten guarantee that even if she won't spy for them, when required she will help them acquire what they term “useful information”. You know that's how they work over here. We have to be vigilant. I hope you understand our situation.'

I told him that I understood the implications very well, and that my decision was final.

‘No, no,' he insisted, ‘please don't misunderstand me. As far as we're concerned you are of course absolutely and perfectly free to do whatever is in your own interests. My duty is to ensure that I've warned you. That's all.'

He gave me four weeks to think about his advice and if I hadn't changed my mind he would do everything in his power to, as he put it, conclude the matter successfully. He further advised me that although it wasn't an essential requirement, it would facilitate ‘my case' if I were to obtain written approval from my father or someone else with authority in my family.

‘So you still want to marry me?' Anna asked after hearing my account of the meeting.

‘It's all so complicated.'

‘So?'

‘I have a month to consider.'

‘After which you may change your mind?'

‘You know I won't.'

‘Why?'

‘Because I love you, you idiot, that's why. Love you more than—'

‘I know. I'm sorry.' She looked at me and grinned. ‘Let's make a baby. They can't stop us marrying then.'

This was unexpected. I was stunned. ‘Are you serious?' I stammered.

‘Caught you, ha,' she said, and giggled. ‘I was joking, stupid. It's too early to think about babies.'

Anna

I knew that he enjoyed touching me but looking at me, he confided, gave him even more pleasure. Touching, he explained, brought everything too close, whereas looking restored the necessary distance. Looking and touching, he went on, were two different but complementary events of the same act of feeling the world. Take the opera glasses we hire in a theatre: through one end the world draws near and splits into minute details, while through the other it recedes and forms itself into one big whole.

It was true that he loved to theorise, but he loved even more to look at me, dressed or undressed. Like a child he adored my being with him and for him. I could feel how this pleasure lit him up from inside like a glow-worm. Then when I got into bed he would seem so warm, soft and cuddly that I'd feel like suckling him like a baby.

I loved his boyish face and found his attempts to disguise it with a beard and a pair of serious spectacles childish. I knew that his boyish look annoyed him but it wasn't in his nature to show anger or frustration. I had never seen him lose control. Only in bed did he appear vulnerable. Even when he was exhausted he would stay awake for me. I knew he couldn't go to sleep without me, but I wanted to be asked, implored: ‘Can you please come to bed now?' But he just waited and waited, in silence. Patience, seemingly immeasurable, was his most definitive attribute.

He never missed a chance to watch me dress and undress, and if I felt like it, I would prolong these moments. I enjoyed seeing him in love with me and relished the intensity with which he desired me. But I realised that by being so open about his longing and his love, he had made himself especially vulnerable, and this realisation troubled me, because the power that I had inadvertently gained could have very easily emptied the noble feeling of love I harboured for him. I confess that at times I was tempted to exploit the precarious situation he had brought upon himself by letting his happiness be ruled by my often fickle moods and emotions.

When I shut the door to undress, he realised that something had gone wrong, that I was annoyed and was punishing him. When I came to bed fully covered he knew that I had made myself inaccessible, that on such nights I would judge his attempts to reach me as violations, that I wanted to be left alone. Strangely he never complained. Like a child, he had learnt to accept his fate. He felt miserable, I know, but understood that once punishment had been meted out and endured, life would once again return to normal.

But did life really regain its usual balance after going through these episodes of power-play and emotional torture? Didn't they corrode our trust in one another? It was as if we were unpicking one by one the seams which bound the fabric of our being in the world, because to be in this world is to be for and with someone.

Vasu

After the wedding we moved into the family
dacha
. Our life there was simple, straightforward and sensible. Most of the time we worked together. One big room was converted into a studio with a large drawing board and a tall table lamp not far from the window. Anna worked at a table in the corner editing my thesis and I helped her translate her book on Gelon. A celebrated English publisher was interested in it.

‘You'll be famous,' I teased her, ‘and further books and articles will be written about you and your book.'

‘Don't be stupid,' she retorted. ‘No one really cares. I'm writing this book because it's the best thing I can do.'

‘What about your cello?'

‘You know that I only like music because I've grown up with it.'

This sort of indifference disappointed me because I knew that she truly loved music and that archaeology too wasn't just her profession.

She sat and typed on a portable machine, asking questions whenever she was defeated by my awful handwriting or my cumbersome sentences. She forced me to break the really lengthy ones into several that were short and succinct. Convoluted ideas were reduced to coherent explanations neatly joined up with proper punctuation.

‘Why don't you write the way you tell stories?' she complained. I would blame the strict conventions of scholarly work, the way it pretended to sound scientific, and the pompous authoritative third-person voice.

Anna listened impatiently. ‘But your thesis is about people and places,' she said.

‘So is your book,' I replied. This upset her even more.

But by and large she was happy with what I had written. Her main concern was that it didn't contain a single quote from Lenin. ‘Without him, your thesis won't get through,' she nagged.

I also enjoyed translating her book, although it wasn't as easy as I had initially thought. I asked her questions, sought clarifications. That tested her patience even more.

‘With translation you have to be careful,' I told her. ‘It's like pouring water: the containers often differ in shape and size, so there are spills and awkward overflows—'

‘I know that, thank you very much,' she interrupted, irritated by my patronising tone.

I was pleased that she had started taking English lessons. She had learned some German at school, where it was compulsory. She was finding English hard, the grammar and spelling in particular. But she was trying.

Anna

Vasu loved to talk about old and new cities. ‘Tell me about Amsterdam,' I would ask him, for instance, and in a flash his whole appearance would change. He would become utterly glorious in this animated state. His voice trembled, his eyes sparkled, his head shook and his arms and hands wafted and waved. He would leap out of bed to get his sketch book, completely forgetting that he had nothing on and that the room was freezing cold.

He would jump back into bed and say ‘Look!' and in less than a minute the shape of the city would appear on the page. He would draw and talk at the same time, words tumbling out as if he were scared that he wouldn't be able to tell me everything and that the moment would be lost forever.