Authors: Barbara Kingsolver
She said, “Most people don’t have to think of dying in their pajamas. And being photographed for the papers.”
“Dear God.”
“Don’t apologize. We’re accustomed.” She lifted her eyes briefly, a pair of gray stones, then looked back to her work. “I’ve been wanting
to tell someone, and probably rather than Van, I should mention this to you. His blood pressure is higher.”
“Lev’s blood pressure? How high?”
“Extremely. The doctor yesterday was very worried.”
“Is Lev worried?”
She folded the last pajama. “Lev thinks a bullet will find him before the stroke arrives. If that answers your question.”
“But you wanted someone else to know. Understandably.”
“Probably there’s nothing you can do. He gets terrible headaches.”
“He seems calm.”
“Oh yes, Lev is calm, calm is Lev. What I said about wearing good pajamas when he is murdered. It’s not photographs he worries about. I don’t mean he is vain. I just cannot think of the word. My English.”
“The word is
dignity
, maybe?”
“Dignity, yes.”
“He could rest a little more. He’s out every morning taking care of the chickens, but any of us could do that.”
“Oh, he is crazy for those animals. I haven’t seen him so affectionate for something since Benno and Stella. Two dogs we had in France.” She grew quiet, visiting memories of dogs, and maybe living children. “I think the animals relieve him,” she said finally. “Something in the world he can keep safe.”
“But maybe it wouldn’t hurt to offer some help?”
“Yes. To you, he might listen. He calls you ‘son.’ You notice it, of course.”
“Of course. Lev has a large heart. He’s father to the whole world, it seems.”
“He said he finds you steadying.”
“He does?”
“In your manner you resemble Sergei. He wouldn’t have mentioned that, but it’s true. Sergei was quiet. Always paying attention. He was for the good of other people.”
“You must miss him. All of them.”
She shook her head side to side, looking out the window, her lips tightly closed.
Outside, the morning was cool, with puddles still standing from a rain in the night. In the far corner of the courtyard against a blaze of red bougainvilleas covering the wall, Lev stood in a circle of hens. He tossed out grain and clucked softly in some form of gallinaceous Russian, apparently engrossed. He looked up, startled.
“Oh! Have you come asking my friends for proof of their dedication?”
“No eggs needed just now. Breakfast is nearly ready.”
“Now you see, I was thinking, the hens make only a collective contribution. But the rabbits are fully dedicated, when called to serve. We may have two factions here.”
“Like the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks.”
He pursed his lips and nodded. “The Omelletscheviks. And the Hassenpfefferviks.”
“Natalya thought you might need help with the animals.”
“No, no.” The flat shovel was out of the tool rack, leaning against the rabbit hutch beside a filled manure bucket. He had cleaned the little shed where the hens roost at night. Later he would take the manure and bury it around the garden.
“You’re a very great thinker, sir. You shouldn’t be doing farm work.”
“You’re wrong about that, my son. Everyone should do farm work. Your name is Shepherd. Did you ever tend sheep?”
“No, sir.”
He took the shovel in hand, watching the hens make their excursionary expeditions into the garden. “Do you know that Stalin is murdering farmers now?”
“Why?”
“His idea for feeding the masses is to create enormous farms. Like factories, with vast machines and armies of unskilled labor. Rather
than trust the wisdom of men of the land. He’s imprisoning yeoman farmers, trying to destroy their class.”
One of the hens caught a lizard, and it writhed wildly in her beak. She ran helter-skelter with all the others in zealous pursuit. Their aptitude for carnivory was impressive.
“That is enough talk of Stalin before breakfast. My young friend Shepherd with no sheep. I meant what I said. Everyone should get dirt on his hands each day. Doctors, intellectuals. Politicians, most of all. How can we presume to uplift the life of the working man, if we don’t respect his work?”
Lev carefully folded the garment he wears to greet the animals each day: an ancient green cardigan with holes at the elbows. Evidently he does not expect to be assassinated while feeding chickens. Or it’s his best hope. He took off his glasses and turned his face to the sun for a moment, boots planted wide, the peasant brow facing heaven. He looked the very image of the People’s Revolution in one of Diego’s murals. Then the former president of the Petrograd Soviet put away the manure shovel and went to his breakfast.
Today Van was married. Who could have imagined it two years ago, this very day, on a painted picnic boat in the canals of Xochimilco? Frida was correct, of course, Van didn’t need the
trapanovio
to catch his true love. Nor did Lev, it seems. He holds hands with Natalya, and together they stand on the deck of this ocean liner, a ship with trustworthy friends and cactuses planted in its hold, and they watch the sun set behind the high wall that encloses them. Frida has been less lucky in love or anything else, declining to get out of bed for weeks now. Her body threatens to fold up shop, and good riddance, she says, since Diego no longer wants it.
Van and his American girl Bunny were wed this morning in city hall, in the nuptial office whose door happens to be directly under Diego’s mural of the ancient Mayans harvesting cacao, though the lovers probably didn’t notice. They plan to move soon to an apart
ment in New York. Natalya shed a few tears, as tiny and undramatic as her black shoes. She has always known she would lose this son, along with every other.
Lev was more jovial, congratulating the couple with formal toasts and Russian love poems recited from memory. Bunny wore a crown of twined flowers, some old-world notion of Natalya’s, and somehow procured a bag of Van’s beloved licorice for a wedding present. In the courtyard he stood blue-eyed beside his bride making disheveled toasts, absent his shoes for some reason. When Bunny reached on tiptoe to set her floral crown on Van’s head, he smiled so broadly his molars gleamed. So grateful for her affection. He has no idea that everything about him can stop a heart: his shrug, like a little Dutch boy, shoulders raised high and then dropped. His beautiful white feet.
Celebrations are rare in this house, maybe all the more joyful for that reason. And if joy did not fill every quarter, at least no one spent the whole day cooking.
Britain has entered the war. Winston Churchill sent an Expeditionary Force into France, thousands of soldiers to defend the Maginot Line and prevent all of Europe falling to Hitler. Every evening after the plates are cleared, Lev turns on the radio receiver, and everyone goes quiet. All the boisterous opinions that normally fill this room are quashed by one thin voice quivering out of the air from some other world into the yellow-painted dining room. Why should Lev believe the wireless reports, when all others fail him? He struggles with the question himself. But is so hungry for knowledge, he casts his net wide and picks through the catch, hoping he can tell fish from flotsam.
It seemed impossible that this singular man, Hitler, could pull the whole world into the cauldron of his ambitions. Now it’s only a question of the order in which nations are pulled. And what unexpected arrangements, as nations find themselves shoulder to shoulder with others, or face to face against: Canadians on the soil of France, Germans in Poland, Russians and Finns on the shores of the Baltic Sea.
Even in the horror of war, Lev is optimistic; he says it will make internationalists of us all. A modernized proletariat will unite, because war so conspicuously benefits rich men and kills the poor ones.
“Surely the French munitions worker can see how his labors fill the pockets of war financiers in the city of London.” He says the factory worker and peasant of every nation will discover that their common enemy is the factory owner, exploiting their labor, keeping them poor and powerless.
But this boy in a French or British factory, standing in his leather overall welding the casing on a metal bomb: what can he see? That thing will fly through the air, fall hundreds of miles away, and kill boys in leather overalls in a German factory. The reports will roar victory or defeat, and boys will never know how alike their lives have been.
Seva has arrived from Paris, to put his arms around his grandparents for the first time in his memory. He calls Lev “Monsieur Grandfather,” it breaks Natalya’s heart. The Rosmers, who brought him, are their oldest friends: Alfred the cartoon Frenchman with his long neck, moustache, and beret, and round Marguerite, clasping everyone to her bosom. Lev says he and Alfred have fought Stalin together since Prinkipo. The Rosmers will stay some months now in Mexico, they are renting a house. France is uncertain, to say the least, and the boy needs time to adjust. He’s lived with the Rosmers most of the time since Zinaida died, after Marguerite located him in a religious orphanage. Lev never talks about any of that. Zinaida was his eldest, the story unfolds a little at a time: tuberculosis, leaving the USSR with her baby for treatment in Berlin. Her visa revoked by Stalin, the husband Platon disappearing in a prison camp.
Seva is now thirteen, a tall schoolboy in short pants and leather sandals. He speaks Russian and French and not a word of Spanish, and walks carefully around the courtyard watching the hummingbirds that hover at the red flowers. Marguerite wanted to know what they are
called. In France, she said, they don’t have such things. It must be true, because Seva dashed in red-faced with excitement over the creature. Marguerite made him slow down so she could translate his desires. A net or a pillowcase, he wanted. Anything in which he could capture it.
Natalya hugged him hard, already torn with remorse over the forces that govern this family. “No, Seva, you won’t be allowed to capture it,” she said. “Your grandfather believes in freedom.”
On Your Leaving
Praise the Vanguard, because it says your name. Van evanescent, servant of the advance, praise any word that could hold you. Praise your jacket that hangs on the peg, still holding one shoulder aloft, slow to forget the comrade it embraced.
Praise all but the vanishing point where we stand now, not quite parted. Already memories fall like blows. But soon they will be treasure, dropped like gold through a miser’s fingers as he makes his accounts: the years at a desk, elbow to your elbow. The Flemish lilt of your words, like the shift and drop of a typewriter carriage, every sentence luminous and careful: a library with poppy fields inside. The times our teacups crossed by accident, the shock of tasting your licorice there. The brotherhood of small rooms in locked-up houses, the drift of quiet words while waiting for sleep, a restlessness we cast over blended boyhoods: the captured fish in a glass, the spaniel that ran away in a Paris park. You were always first to escape. The sight of you, falling like rain into your own beatific slumber.
Praise each insomniac hour, kept wide awake by your glow. Sleep would only have robbed more coins from this vandal hoarded store.
—
HWS, OCTOBER
1939
Folded into an envelope, it was another letter left lying in the office for someone to see, this time not an accident. With Van’s name typed on the outside, and then for good measure the address also, it looked like one of the endless messages delivered in the courier’s bag. A memorandum to be filed. A cowardly disguise, yes, but who in this world who ever wrote a love poem wants to stand by blushing while the lover reads it? Such things should be tucked in a coat pocket and read in a different room, or somewhere else altogether. He and Bunny leave tonight on the evening train.
His valises were all packed and his mind too; he seemed halfway in New York when he came into the office looking for his black shoes. He took the jacket off the peg by the door, one last time, and put it on as he always does, shifting it across his shoulders to get it settled. The shoes were located, absurdly, on top of the file cabinet. Probably set there by Natalya when she swept.
“Well, comrade Shepherd. We have had a go at the world together in this little headquarters, have we not?”
“We have. It has been very great, Van. You taught me worlds of things. It’s hard to say how much.”
He shrugged. Glanced at the envelope on the corner of the desk. “More filing, on a Sunday?”
“I think it’s old, maybe from Friday.”
“But it’s for me, you’re sure? Not for the commandant?”
“It’s your name on it. Probably just a news clip or something. It couldn’t be very important.”
He smiled and shook his head, sliding his eyes toward the dining room where Lev plowed his way through the daily quotient of newspapers. “Long live the Revolution and work that never ends. But mine here is done.”
He dropped the envelope in the wastepaper basket.
The rains have ended. Soon the migrant birds will come back from the north.
The Trotskyist Party in the United States continues to send migrants too, a small, steady flow of young men eager to work for Lev. They are good boys with plenty of heart and muscle, put to work mostly as rooftop guards and kitchen help. Socialist Workers, they call their party, and most are from what they call the “Downtown Branch” in New York. Jake and Charlie were first to arrive, with a fat, smuggled envelope of cash, support from the worldwide movement that is well put to use in this household. As was the bottle of brandy they produced in time for Van’s wedding.
The newest one is Harold, who “bunks” with Jake and Charlie, speaking their same language of
conk
and
dig me
and
togged to the bricks
. Mother would have adored these boys, though she’d probably lose patience with their praise for the common man.
With Van gone, letters and drafts are starting to pile in a backlog inside Lev’s brain, but he won’t let these boys help much with secretarial work. He says it requires special skill; the best secretary to a writer must be a writer himself. (“Even, perhaps, a novelist,” he conspires with a twinkle.) Lev’s study table is mounded with papers, ink bottles, boxes of wax cylinders from the Ediphone. The calendar lying open on his desk must be excavated each morning, to turn the page on a new day. The books mount in polyglot piles: Russian, French, Spanish, and English all in one stack, representing different strata in his miraculous brain. A layer for each new country in his journey.