After Love (17 page)

‘Amsterdam used to be a small fishing village near the mouth of the Amstel,' he told me, showing me the shoreline, the narrow delta and the meandering bend of the river. ‘That's where it gets its name: the dammed Amstel.'

‘First they built a sea-dyke to protect the village from the tides, then they dammed the river and put a bridge across it.' The dam and the bridge appeared on the page, followed by a semicircular canal with a wall protecting the settlement on three sides.

‘In the seventeenth century, when a new plan for the city was accepted, they constructed three canals following the shape of the outer moat. They were joined by four others running at right angles, creating a complex network more than eighty kilometres long. Parallel to these ran the streets and the main thoroughfares, criss-crossed by the famous bridges, steep, arched and hump-backed. Along the streets they planted rows of elm and lime trees and behind them stood the tall, gabled red-brick houses of the rich burghers.'

He showed me his sketch. ‘It's like a spider web, isn't it?' I said.

‘Yes it is,' he said, pulling up the bedclothes and continuing the story.

‘The Dutch mastered the design of water-cities. In the Leninka I found an English translation of a pamphlet by Simon Stevin, the Dutchman who refined the art of building such cities. He was a genius. Soon other famous cities followed—'

‘One of them our own St Petersburg,' I interrupted him. ‘But of the others I have no clue.' He laughed at the phrase ‘no clue', and I let him enjoy the moment, because it made him very seductive.

‘The other famous one was at the southern end of an island, east of the Hudson River,' he said. ‘It was called New Amsterdam.'

‘Which later became the famous New York,' I added.

I was amazed at the way he was able to remember the exact shapes of so many cities. ‘There's nothing particularly clever about it,' he said. ‘All I need is one visual clue and the whole thing pours out by itself.' Brasilia reminded him of an eagle flying down from a hill, ready to land in the lake to take a dip. Venice, when he drew it, appeared like two hands clasped together.

He thought Alexandria the most beautiful city in the world. In his drawing it had the shape of an ibis lying on brown sand washed by the turquoise waters of a warm sea.

‘Leningrad, if you could see it like a bird flying high in the sky, would appear as a triple-headed python.'

‘And what about Moscow?'

‘It's like you,' he said, smiling mischievously. He drew mounds, round and soft, intersected by streams and rivers. The best plan for a city in such undulating landscape, smoothed by glaciers, had to be a system of concentric rings.

This time I felt his hands and fingers tracing lines and shapes on my body, not his notebook.

One day he drew only a triangle, at the three corners of which he wrote: Topography, Technology and Translation. ‘The shape of a city is defined by these three elements,' he lectured.

‘Is it really so simple?' I teased him.

‘Not at all,' he replied and added a fourth corner. This represented land and its ownership: its value, commercial and symbolic.

‘I am looking for a word starting with T for it as well,' he continued, ‘but I can't find it. So I call the system 3Ts and an L.'

I found it amusing, this drive of his to transform ideas into neat schemata with regular geometrical shapes, well-defined and properly labelled.

‘What about Translation?' I asked.

‘By that I mean communication, movement and flow,' he said. ‘Communication brings people together and converts a town or city into what the Greeks used to call the
polis
. Plato said that an ideal city would be limited to the number of citizens who could hear a single voice.'

He sighed. ‘Technology has changed everything. The polis has turned into megalopolis, a gargantuan agglomeration of space crowded with people. Communication so often fails in our modern cities.'

‘If you're so attached to your T, why not call it Transport?' I asked.

‘Translation is both exact and a metaphor. I love metaphors,' he confessed. He planned to write a thick book on the history of urban design using the 3Ts and an L as an organising principle. The largest section would be devoted to Translation because he was convinced that without communication, cities as living entities wither and die.

Once he got going, he was unstoppable. ‘Cities need rivers, lakes, canals and fountains to relieve the unyielding built-up spaces. The flow and trickle of water adds a sense of time and, like a mirror, it produces reflections, fluid and flickering, for us to look at and ponder.'

‘How will you ever finish such an ambitious book?' I teased. ‘Why don't you work on something smaller, a bit more realistic?'

His face became sad. ‘Yes, you're right. It
is
too ambitious. Just like your Papa's book on jazz.'

Vasu

We were sitting in the studio working when suddenly Anna looked at me and asked abruptly: ‘Do you find me beautiful?'

It was so unexpected that I found myself unable to answer. I was scared my silence would be taken the wrong way.

‘No need to hurry,' she finally said. ‘Take your time – and when you've thought about it a bit more, please let me know.'

Then she rushed out the door.

It took me a full three days to come up with a proper answer.

‘This is for you,' I said, handing her a sketch. In it she was standing holding the cello in her left hand. Her hair was gathered into a ponytail and her face, dominated by her big eyes, looked straight out. She was wearing a summer dress and her other arm was resting on the back of the chair. The window was open and a pigeon sat on the sill looking at her.

‘So you
do
find me attractive?' she said. ‘And don't say
of course.'

I kept quiet and just as I was about to speak she came right up and kissed me. As she turned away I heard her sob.

‘Sorry,' she said. She looked at the sketch and asked me if she could keep it.

I told her that of course she could and as she gazed at it again, a naughty smile appeared on her face. ‘I like it – but I want to hear you actually utter the words as well. Tell me,
why
do you find me attractive?'

Then before I could say anything, she walked out of the studio.

Anna

I took a photo of Vasu sitting outside on the steps in his sky-blue shirt and denim jeans, his hair nicely washed and combed, his moustache and his pointed Lenin-beard in need of trimming. He looked so pensive and anxious. I could see it in the way his lips were tightened. When I touched him, he trembled.

I had been late home that night and he had been worried about me. I went inside, grabbed the camera and took the photo. He seemed on the verge of tears. I must confess that I wanted him to cry, to find out if he really could.

He didn't, but I kept the photo. ‘This is for me,' I told him, ‘and for our daughter to see and remember. This image will stay in the filing cabinet of my memory. Isn't that the way it works? Traces forever etched into our minds?'

I wanted to provoke him into saying something about memory in his own special style. He took the bait and began to tell me about the magical power of visual images and the way they inhabit the memory. Then he quoted his favourite Bergson and went into a long explanation of the relation between mind, matter and memory.

‘The mind is not a receptacle, my dear Anna, where words and images find a place to nest or where, like bees, we deposit nectar. It's not the brain either, a mushy mix of grey and white matter. Memory doesn't live inside or outside our mind or body. It doesn't live at all, because its lifespan in the world is infinitesimally brief. Like a match which produces fire when rubbed against the rough surface of a box, so memory is produced each time we try to remember. We recreate it each time we recall.'

I felt terrible the way I laid such traps for him. The poor soul fell into them every time.

Vasu

There was no television in the
dacha
at Prudkino and we rarely bothered with the newspapers. ‘In
Pravda
,' we would say, ‘there is no
pravda
(truth) and
Izvestia
is without any
izvestii
(news).'

Our radio played only music. But rumours were everywhere. Often they would walk in with our visitors. When Aunty Olga came to stay overnight, she brought with her fresh stories of scandals and intrigues.

Soon I stopped reading Russian newspapers altogether but kept my ears open for anecdotes, jokes and stories. Whenever I had a few spare minutes I would note them down in my diary in Hindi, not because I wished to hide them from Anna but because I didn't want to forget my own language.

Leonid Mikhailovich seemed to ignore them both: the news and the gossip. He was too busy with his work. One evening he invited us to a ballet at the Bolshoi. He had told us that he would meet us near the main entrance but we didn't find him there and had to wait. When he finally arrived in a taxi – unusual for him – he found us both huddled miserably under a big umbrella. He hurried towards us, slipped, and dropped his bag.

We rushed to help him up. ‘Are you all right, Papa?' Anna asked anxiously.

‘Of course,' he replied.

By the time we entered the hall we found the artistic director onstage introducing Plisetskaya's
Anna Karenina
. The director was short and round and spoke with a pronounced lisp. Luckily his speech didn't last long. As he left the stage he stumbled, looked out at the audience and laughed. People clapped and giggled.

The conductor arrived in the pit, the lights dimmed and the curtain opened onto a railway platform, much simpler than most Bolshoi sets. There were just a few props and a brass band on the right-hand side of the stage. The musical opening was brief. We heard the whistle of a steam engine and the rattle of wheels, followed by screeching brakes. Then the music became softer and we heard the sound of footsteps. Someone shouted
ostorozhno
(beware) as the dancers appeared on the stage.

I found the beginning slow and flat but the solo mazurka danced by Plisetskaya's Anna in the third scene made my heart leap. The moves lacked the natural elegance of a mazurka; her steps were clipped and the curves angular, her body awkward, nervy, perhaps a pointer to the tragedy that would soon unfold. The dissonant chords of the music accentuated the flow of the dance. The effect was intense. I turned to look at Anna and she caught my glance. She slid her hand into mine and squeezed it.

‘Karenin,' she whispered and handed me the opera glasses to observe the unfortunate Aleksei Karenin. His dancing was more like a laboured choreographed walk. He seemed weighed down by fate and his own inability to forgive. He was dancing with a limp, I thought, and for a moment the limp with which Leonid Mikhailovich walked flashed into my mind.

Afterwards, over dinner at his favourite restaurant he told us about an explosion of methane gas at one of the huge coalmines which had killed at least twenty miners. He was nervous because he had been asked to chair an inquiry, and wasn't sure how his recommendations would be received by the Party.

We didn't return to the
dacha
that night but stayed at the apartment. In the middle of the night Aunty Olga called. She was fretting about one of her Ukrainian friends who had married an American professor she had met at an economics conference in Paris. Although she had completed all the necessary paperwork and got the relevant approvals, she had still not been allowed to join her husband in New York.

‘So what do you think she did?' she said after a pause. ‘She went to the American Embassy and chained herself to the fence near the entrance.'

‘That's it,' Aunty Olga concluded. ‘No America for her.'

‘Don't worry about us,' said Anna. ‘Vasu isn't American. We'll be fine.'

‘I hope so,' she said.

Anna

Vasu found an epigraph for his thesis, a quotation from Marx: ‘Man lives by nature. This means nature is his body, with which he must constantly remain in tune if he is not to die. That man's physical and spiritual life is tied to nature means no more than that nature is tied to itself, for man is part of nature.'

I liked the quotation, which pleased him. ‘Where did you find it?' I asked. He showed me a chapter called
Alienated Labour
in the collected works of Marx and Engels. Marx borrowed the idea of alienation from Hegel and reinterpreted it to fit his own theories, he told me.

I wanted to say that the alienation we felt in this great socialist society of ours was as profound as that in any bourgeois one. But I didn't want to upset him either. Perhaps that's why I asked him instead about his fascination with Marxism.

I know that his integrity is unimpeachable. To please others for short-term gain is against his nature. But it often disheartened me that a man of his intellect could be so naïve and gullible.

He struggled to formulate his answer, and this amused me. I had never seen him like this before. If he has doubts, I said to myself, he can be saved.
From what?
I asked and scolded myself for being presumptuous and arrogant. What right had I to think that he needed to be saved and that only I could save him?

He became a Marxist because of Uncle Triple K, he finally said. He had inherited it from him, not only his Marxism but his whole way of being. The world he saw around him in India and the way he perceived it reinforced his belief. The books he read gave him confidence. He knew he wasn't the only one. There were others like him, with similar dreams and aspirations, and perhaps that was why books still remained the primary source of his inspiration.

But, he continued, he didn't believe in either Socialism or Communism. I wanted to object: Marxism without Communism is unthinkable. But one look at his face told me that he wouldn't be able to handle further interrogation. I gave up, knowing that now he would sulk for days.