After Love (25 page)

‘Take this apple, please. It's better than chocolates,' a young woman with a red scarf said. She produced a couple of large and tempting apples, which also soon disappeared.

A soldier murmured to Yasya that they had been warned not to accept food from the huge crowd in front of the White House. Chocolates or biscuits could be poisoned, they were told.

‘These are fine, son,' a man who could have been a retired soldier tried to reassure them.

‘That's what they told us when we marched into Prague.'

‘But this is Moscow. Here we're all are Russians, aren't we?'

‘He won't shoot me,' a
babushka
standing under an umbrella said. ‘I'm a grandmother, just like his.'

‘Yes, she looks like you,' the young soldier replied.

Every time Yasya phoned, Katya warned him to take care. ‘Keep yourself out of trouble, do you hear, away from trouble?' she cautioned him. ‘Don't bait the soldiers. They're young and inexperienced and tense. Don't irritate them. I want you back home safe and sound.'

‘Safe and sound,' Yasya repeated each time.

The following evening I would meet Yasya and Lena, Shurik's daughter, in front of the White House and stay there all night. Katya was in the kitchen. ‘The
Vremya
is on,' I heard her calling. ‘Come and see what they're showing.' It was a short news report, but quite daring for the main news programme of the national channel. Yeltsin read a statement criticising the putsch. The camera moved away from him, showing the barricades near the White House. Commentary continued, interrupted by Yeltsin's loud voice. Most intriguing were pictures from Leningrad, where a similar protest against the coup had begun.

‘Our darling Seriozha Medvedev will be in trouble,' Tamrico said about a well-known newsreader.

‘And not only him,' replied Katya. ‘What about the producer and the crew?' She had worked for a few months with the producer's wife.

‘Aren't they brave to report? Now people at the barricades know that they're not alone, that others care about them and will join them, tanks or no tanks.'

I wasn't so sure. In Tiananmen Square in Beijing, not long ago, the world had watched as an unarmed young man had dared to confront a column of tanks. He had walked right up to the leading tank and, ignoring the huge gun pointed at him, begun talking to the soldiers.

He had escaped unharmed, but hundreds of other protestors had been crushed under the tanks or shot on that June night in 1989. Had they seen that on Russian television?

‘No – and perhaps it's just as well,' Tamrico replied. ‘Imagine how that would have frightened people! But we all watched the attack on the television station in Vilnius. It was really scary.'

‘Yes, that was terrible,' said Katya, ‘but Shurik thinks it shows how brutal power can be resisted. The best way to resist, he says, is to remain peaceful—'

‘Shurik sounds more and more like Gandhi these days,' said Tamrico. ‘I'm not convinced. Fear can force people to do silly things. But Shurik believes that Russians are different, not as cruel and despotic as Asians. When I tell him that Gandhi was an Asian and that there is a bit of Asian in every Russian, and furthermore that his comments are racist, he just smiles. He won't change his mind.'

I said nothing. What could I say? I was only too aware of the misery, deprivation and cruelty of India, not all of which could be attributed to poverty and colonial oppression. But I wasn't about to agree that Asians were somehow naturally flawed. So I didn't say a word.

My mind was troubled by two events unfolding simultaneously. On the streets a couple of kilometres from our house, a tense spectacle of life and death was playing itself out. Then in a tiny closed room nearby, one of my dearest friends was waiting to die.

‘What should I do?' I thought. ‘Should I join Shurik, Yasya, Lena and the others at the barricades or should I go to the library and sit beside Vladimir? Should I grieve for my friend or go and witness history? What will happen? Will it end in bloodshed or will people at last show some real courage, step back and find a peaceful way to resolve the crisis?'

I spent most of the next night in the library with Vladimir. The doctor came and told us that the end was near.

‘We can stop the drip now,' he said. ‘He has gone beyond pain and suffering. Morphine is useless now.'

‘Are you sure, Ivan Vasillivich?' Katya said. ‘I can hear him moaning.'

‘That will soon stop,' the doctor replied. ‘He's now too weak to make a sound. I'll come again in the morning. But don't hesitate to call if you need me.'

When the drip was removed, all signs of movement disappeared and calmness descended on the room. The scene was set for Vladimir's final exit. I found it hard to sit there. The room seemed to have transformed itself into a flat painting, expunged of time and place.

‘Have I stopped living too?' I wondered.

Vladimir was clinging to life and when I looked carefully at him, I saw him move slightly. At the windows the curtains blew and we heard drops of rain against the window. Tiny puddles of water appeared on the floor. I got up to close the window and heard faint sounds of heavy trucks, the rumble of moving tanks and the muffled voices of the crowd outside.

Then I was alone in the room. I felt anxious. I had seen dead people before but had never experienced the exact moment of dying. ‘Does the last gasp of air empty the lungs and they collapse?' I asked myself. ‘Is there a sound, a snort perhaps or a cry or just a soft noise like a damp firecracker unwilling to go bang? What sound does the spirit make when it escapes the body?' For Hindus, it's the
prana
, the breath, born from the mouth of Adipurusha, the primeval being. But is the
prana
the last breath? Does it leave the body to travel with the wind in search of some greater being? Earth to earth, as they say, ashes to ashes, dust to dust and nothing afterwards but endless wandering through the memories of those who have been left behind, until they themselves vanish.

I was glad that Katya didn't leave me alone for long. Soon she came to sit with us and we waited in silence for death to leave the windowsill, step gently across the floor to Vladimir and, without waking him, take him away.

We both dozed. At around five o'clock next morning I woke to see Katya standing near the bed, speaking to Vladimir.

‘I had a dream,' I said, ‘and I saw you with Yasya.'

‘I know. I heard you mumble in your sleep. But I too had a dream of Yasya and you.'

‘How strange,' I said and began to describe my dream.

‘I saw Christ on the cross. His face was pale, paler than anything I have ever seen. His arms hung uselessly and in the middle of the palms of his hands were red spots of blood. His head was bound with a white scarf and around his hips was a white cloth with black stripes. It was so small, so inadequate, that I wanted to remove my shirt to cover his bruised legs. The wind ruffled his cloth very slightly and blew my hair which, to my great surprise, was long and red.

‘I was standing on the side of a hill and could see men and women sitting in a boat rowing with their bare hands. Behind them was a village on fire. Flames, bright red and yellow, reached the sky, mixed with clouds of smoke from burnt-out huts. I heard shouts, the footsteps of soldiers, then gunshots. I saw you walk past, your head covered in a blue scarf with silver spots, holding Yasya in your arms. His little head was resting on your shoulder. You looked at me as if I were a stranger and said: “Run away, my boy. The soldiers are coming.” But I didn't run and you disappeared, walking slowly along the dirt track cutting across the slope.

‘No sooner had you gone than I heard Vladimir's voice. I looked for him but couldn't see him, even though his voice was all around me. I tried to listen carefully. “Minutes pass while I, Matthew the Levite, sit here on Mount Golgotha. And still he isn't dead!” Then again: “The sun is setting and death hasn't yet come.” Then there was a long pause, after which the voice came so close to me that I felt as if it were my own. “God! Why are you so angry with him? Ask death to come and take him away.”

‘The voice was lost in the wind, leaving me alone. Still I didn't run. I waited and waited, confident that someone would come to tell me what I needed to know. He finally appeared. I recognised him immediately. He wore a green gown and cap and carried a sack on his right shoulder. “Get up and walk,” he said. “The Messiah has gone and the Cross has vanished. It's time for you to get up and go too.”

‘I looked round and found that on the hill there was no one to be seen. Nothing but stones and dust and above them a completely empty sky. I felt sudden heartbreaking loneliness.'

‘But he is still here,' said Katya.

We both approached the bed and listened. Vladimir was still breathing.

It took several days for me to make sense of the dream. After Vladimir's funeral, when the room had been emptied and turned back into a studio, I got the chance to look properly at Chagall's
White Crucifixion
. There I saw the pale figure on the cross, the people in the boat and the village on fire. I also saw the person in the green gown. Chagall described him as Ahasverus, the Wandering Jew. In the foreground of the painting was a woman in a scarf carrying a child in her arms. ‘I must have been looking at the painting just before I was overcome by sleep,' I thought. Vladimir's voice I could explain, but the words he had spoken mystified me.

Shurik told me: ‘Go and look at Chapter 16 of Book One of
The Master and Margarita.
' I found the words in Bulgakov's novel. They were the words of Matthew, the Levite.

The following evening I went outside to join the crowds at the White House.

I walked along Arbat Street, reached Smolensk Embankment and turned right to see the flimsy and hastily erected barricades which looked quite incapable of stopping tanks. At Smolensk Square, both on Kalininsky Prospect to my right and on Kutuzov Street to my left, I saw a long column of tanks surrounded by people holding umbrellas. If they were ordered to attack, I thought, and if they followed those orders, there would be utter chaos.

The square and streets close to the White House were lined with barricades. The material from nearby construction sites had been easy to pile up, but everyone knew that wire-mesh fencing, metal rods, wooden planks, tyres and blocks of concrete would at best only hinder tanks and would merely delay the final assault.

But resistance on the streets was spontaneous and carried its own simple logic: people would do what they could with bare hands and bodies, but would not attack first. Should the tanks advance, they would move aside. Their main aim was to shame the soldiers.

I decided to walk along Kalininsky Prospect looking for the clinic where twelve years before Anna and I had lost our baby. On the way I saw the cinema where I watched
Solaris
. I reached the cinema theatre and realised that I didn't have the courage to go further. I turned back. Not far away was the wreckage of a trolleybus run over by a tank. Some young people were taking pieces of the wrecked bus and piling them in front of the barricades. Two girls of nine or ten stood on another tank and waved to the crowd. A boy with a lollipop protruding from his mouth slid up and down the barrel of its gun. Young men stood on other tanks holding up placards and posters.

Some tanks were draped in the Russian tricolour flag from pre-Soviet times. This juxtaposition of tanks, trucks and unarmed people swarming around them trying to domesticate them, to make them look friendly and less threatening, seemed bizarre.

A young soldier appeared out of a tank and began talking to a
babushka
who wanted to feed him
pirozhki
. People were loaded with bags containing whatever food they had found at home. Everyone felt that the soldiers had been on duty for hours without anything to eat or drink.

‘Keep them fed and entertained and they won't shoot,' said a woman near me. Others in the crowd said she was right.