The Russian Jerusalem (2 page)

Her beauty had brought her little happiness. She had been married three times, but when I knew her she was alone. And poor, though sometimes she had grand visitors. Solzhenitzyn, for instance, came to see her when he was writing
August
1914
. He wanted to investigate the memories she had of her father's study. She was more interested in the waifs and strays, for whom she always had house room. A handsome young layabout slept on her floor for six months. When I asked her why she allowed herself to be ripped off so blatantly, she shrugged and told me she was bored.

‘You know, I think I was only happy for three months out of my whole life and the only thing that makes my living bearable now is knowing I can always end it.'

I have never felt like that, even in the wasteland of widowhood. There was something a little puritanical, however, in my insistence on activity. Why else would I have arranged to meet Daniel?

Daniel was the son of an old Cambridge friend, working for a year as a professor at the University of St Petersburg, and he collected me one evening to take me out to supper. I barely recognised him. He was pale, with fair hair, but now there was a stubble of darker beard pushing up through his skin, and when he spoke he kept his voice low; it was
hard to catch his words. He seemed to be strung too tight, as if under some intolerable strain. I recognised something of myself in him.

‘What are you doing here this time?' he asked.

‘Working,' I said shortly.

Once on the street, Daniel put up his hand to hail a passing car, though the restaurant was not far away. It is a commonplace, inexpensive way to get round Russian cities.

I was already sorry I had agreed to meet him. He was a distinguished economist, who understood the New Russia far better than I did, but we had little in common. We stood at the kerbside, in the freezing sleet, and perhaps to amuse himself, he began to tease me. He believed material prosperity would transform the Russian spirit, and mocked my attachment to the literature of the past century. Indeed, even as he thanked me for sending him a copy of my recent biography, he could not resist adding, ‘People here say your Akhmatova is the other face of Stalin.' I rose to the bait hotly even as we clambered into a green Volkswagen, and he replied with malicious glee: ‘In Putin's Russia, print runs for poetry are no bigger than ours in the West, and this is how it should be: people love poetry as they love God, when life has nothing else to offer. And, in any case, these Russian writers you love so much, they all hated Jews.'

I knew he was right about the ancient Russian loathing of Jews, but found myself arguing: ‘Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva took Jewish lovers, Marina's husband was a Jew. And where would Russian literature of the twentieth century be without Osip Mandelstam, Isaac Babel and Boris Pasternak?'

At this, the driver turned his head and observed in fluent English, ‘She is right, you know.' He had a dark, Italianate face and brilliant eyes.

‘There are many other drivers willing to take passengers,' Daniel observed uneasily.

Seeing his uncertainty, the driver swiftly offered a card neatly printed in roman script. He was an actor, at the moment unemployed.

‘I remember now,' said Daniel suddenly. ‘You played the devil Woland in the Taganka production of
The Master and Margarita
. Isn't that so?'

Our driver nodded and, as he turned to smile, I thought he truly resembled the Devil, with his glittering eyes and narrow face. I was a little troubled. If the Devil ever appeared in contemporary St Petersburg, he would surely have the same alarming confidence, and the citizens of this city would no doubt behave with the same greed as those of Bulgakov's Soviet Moscow.

‘You see that police station?' our driver remarked. ‘That is where Raskolnikov confessed his crimes to the Inspector.'

Ghosts everywhere, I thought. A city of ghosts. Even the characters in a novel have an afterlife here.

The restaurant was out of the tourist way, and not particularly grand, but to my irritation I had to let Daniel pay for the meal, since I discovered I had no money. I don't know where my wallet was stolen from me. I may have been robbed in the few moments taking shelter from the rain in a coffee shop near the Hermitage where I talked to a couple of friendly Tazhiks. As if to confirm his control of the situation, Daniel changed my English cheque for
£
200.

As I lay in bed that night – suddenly far too hot since the heating had come on and water was boiling in the radiators – I knew I had to report the loss at a police station because my insurance required it. The police would be wearily
indifferent but they would give me a piece of paper. As I dropped into sleep, I wondered whether I would meet some image of Dostoevsky's Inspector Porfiry, and if he would be an old KGB apparatchik.

In Raskolnikov's police station a screen saver swirled on the iMac, but the desk was littered with heaps of paper, wire trays, staplers and a Sellotape tin of cigarette butts. The man behind the desk was not dressed as a policeman. He wore a blue trilby hat, slanted to a thirties gangster angle, and his thick neck protruded from an open shirt.

‘Passport. Tickets. Visa,' he said.

I gave him my documents and told my story.

He did not hand over the Form of Complaint I expected. He seemed to have something quite else on his mind as he stared at me.

‘Your business in St Petersburg?'

‘A tourist,' I said.

‘It says here WRITER. What do you write?'

I hesitated.

‘Poems, mainly.'

‘So you like Russian poetry?'

‘Of course.'

‘Then perhaps I can interest you. Follow me.'

I was intrigued, if puzzled, and obeyed him.

‘Forget Putin's Russia,' he said. ‘The pastries with
cloudberry
jam in the Astoria Hotel. The oligarchs, the store windows of sable coats, the caviar, the tourist tat. Put Nevsky Prospekt out of your mind. We are going back through the many names of the city, each one with its own ghosts. Are you ready? I want to show you my city. Not the Rastrelli
staircases, the palaces, the golden domes, but the shabby rooms where I learnt to love poetry. Don't be surprised. In Russia even policemen love poetry.'

‘Who are these people? With heavy overcoats?'

‘The hoods and pimps of the inner city. Now they are Mafia, then they were KGB. To go back is like opening a wooden doll. Look around you. The advertisements for Big Macs and Coca-Cola are fading. There on the wall is Lenin wearing his worker's cap with a carnation in his lapel. Now we are in brilliant sunlight on the quay beside the
Aurora
.'

‘To hear the shot that fired the Revolution?'

‘Please don't be foolish. Look at the clothes.'

‘Then what is the euphoria in the streets?'

‘A coup has been defeated. People on the pavements are trying to sell carrots and bunches of herbs, and a brass band of youngsters is playing
Deutschland über alles
.'

‘I can hear that, but why?'

‘This is the day Leningrad took back its old name of St Petersburg. For these children, Germans are only tourists.'

‘Don't they know about the siege?'

‘For them, that is all grandmothers' tales. Hold on. We are going back through the seasons. Now it is hot summer, with the asphalt melting. The shops are empty. Look at the faces of those who come to buy.'

‘Their faces are closed to me.'

‘These are Soviet times. We must go further back.'

‘I can't go so quickly; it's slippery. And the cinder smoke makes my eyes water.'

‘It is a harsh year. Follow this crooked street.'

My companion now removed his hat, and I could see that his hair was white, and far longer than I imagined. My trust in him began to fade. Above me, I could make out nothing
of the way I had come. I felt like a potholer who has climbed too far down and fears it may be impossible to return to the surface.

‘Here you are,' he said.

I stared around me. Was this the Underworld? A steamy cloud which smelt of hot irons on damp cloth like an
old-fashioned
laundry? There were twittering sounds, like birds. Or the sound of grasshoppers rubbing their legs together. It was the sound made by human shadows: a crowd of them pressed towards me, blindly, their flesh seemingly as flimsy as that of moths.

I guessed at their faces. A young man with large melancholy eyes resembled a camel. A woman with the delicate features of a doll. By the minute, their bodies became more substantial, their gestures firmer. A slight, narrow-shouldered figure with his head thrown back detached itself from the others. From a mutter of conversation, one line suddenly sang out above the others: ‘
We shall meet again in St Petersburg, as if we had buried the sun there
.'

As the mist began to disperse, I made out streetcars and a flower shop. It was a winter afternoon, with yellow sky, and lamps already glittering in the shop windows.

I am no longer in St Petersburg. Nor in the Silver Age. This is a station waiting room, with people huddled on the floor, leaning against suitcases. Several are young soldiers. Others have faces I recognise; an old friend, for instance, with his child's underlip puffing as he talked. And there, sitting on a bench, is a woman who resembles Marina Tsvetaeva in middle age. She looks weary, as she had standing on the cobbles of Clamart one day in 1933, staring towards her chubby son, an old cardigan tucked into a black skirt. Her life has already happened to her, making her gaunt, etching two lines from her nose to her mouth. Her hair is cropped short and her eyes barely focus. She holds a cigarette which has burned down to her fingers.

People are looking at her curiously, with a certain hostility. Her sleeves are secured with a safety pin. There are holes in her skirt. Yet her clothes, though shabby, are not Soviet and she is wearing strings of amber.

She is unaware of their gaze. Or the flies. Her eyes are yellowish, like those of a jungle animal.

Her face changes with her thoughts. There are no bones to preserve composure. She is lighting one cigarette from another. She rolls them with her own fingers, dragging the acrid, home-grown tobacco smoke into her lungs. The past is irrevocable. She would like to shake it out of her head. Burning ash covers her skirt.

Her mind is bloodless, starved of nourishment. Trails of thought cross the emptiness. Fragments of another world. A beach in the Crimea. A meek young boy of seventeen
with eyes too large for his face, looking for a cornelian in the sand. He is Sergei Efron, Seryozha, from a family of revolutionaries. That he has Jewish blood pleases her. All her heroes have always been outlaws and heretics.

He is the first man to enter her bed. And he is clumsy, but she doesn't care, because she loves him. Once they are together they are happy, as children are happy. Even now, with everything lost, she remembers. They will marry. They will have to marry because their first encounters leave her pregnant.

Here at the river station crowds of peasants,
kholkhozniks
, and a few men in uniform are waiting for a steamer to take them north on the River Volga. The war has begun, and the Germans are sweeping into Russia. They are still far from Moscow but some bombardment can be heard at a distance. If Tsvetaeva hears, she gives no sign.

Near the ramp leading to the boats, a girl of three or four begins to cry. Snot runs from her nose. She is pale and probably feverish. Her mother gives a glancing blow to the side of the child's head and the wild crying dwindles into sobs.

It was like the blow of a friendly bear. Animal. No cruelty in it, Tsvetaeva observes without rancour, remembering her own mother; that narrow passionate woman who had driven her to excel so harshly. With words. Contempt. The only reality in her childhood was her mother's ferocity. For a moment, Tsvetaeva remembers the high ceilings, parquet floors and potted plants of the House on Three Ponds Lane and can hear Chopin played on the grand piano. Another world. And an unhappy one, she remembers, thinking of those endless music lessons she endured, the way she was refused writing paper. The loneliness between her parents. And her mother's last words: ‘I only regret music and the sun.'

Her own gifted daughter, Alya, became her playmate, her accomplice, her nurse; a loving acolyte, a poet, an artist. There were whispers in the houses of rich friends about the way she exploited her. Alya was willing. Too willing. Until, suddenly … but Marina cannot bear to remember the first sullen rebellion. The shift in domestic loyalty. Marina ponders her own selfishness in putting poetry before every other duty. A wickedness like the sin of her imagined Marusya, who loved her Vampire so much she fed her whole family to him. Now Alya is in a labour camp. Her thoughts recoil from that pain.

Not that she had any illusions that she would find happiness in her homeland when she returned from France. She followed Seryozha out of Russia, when he escaped to the West after the Civil War. She followed him back when he had to run away from France as a spy. She remembers writing:
If God performs this miracle and leaves you alive, I will follow you like a dog.
Twenty-one years later, in Vanves, she wrote, bitterly:
And go I shall, like a dog.

After so many years in exile, she no longer recognises her native city. Everything in it has changed too much. The poplars around her childhood house are long gone. When she runs to one-time friends, begging help, most are reluctant to see her. Ilya Ehrenburg at least meets her, but his eyes are hooded and blank, his mind filled with other disasters. Ehrenburg – Ehrenburg, who had given up his own attic so that she and Alya had somewhere to stay in Berlin, who brought her the first letter from Boris Pasternak – Ehrenburg hardly registers her presence. All his attention is swallowed by the German threat.

Strangers. She has so often been a stranger. In Prague where her slatternly ways were despised by the house-proud émigrés, or in Paris where her poverty made her a beggar to rich friends. For all the hardship, she survived through her poetry. Now once again in Moscow, her own city, she knows herself unwelcome. Dangerous, too, because her husband is in prison, and her daughter in the Gulag, and people are afraid to be with her. All she needed once was a bedside lamp, a notebook and a little silence. She could enter a world of dreams and fairy tales and write as if under a spell. Now she has not written a poem for nearly two years.

It is no longer clear why it is worth staying alive.

Suddenly there is a little rustle among those waiting for the boat. They have recognised someone notable, and they part to let him pass. Tsvetaeva turns to see Boris Pasternak coming towards her. The crowds give way respectfully. They know his handsome face. It is unmistakeable. Many of them know his poems. She lowers her own head as he comes up to press her hand. A quick goodbye? What else? He does not invite her to join him in his dacha at Peredelkino. Even to come was brave, she knows that but, when he leaves, her face is disappointed.

Loneliness.

She was most lonely in the dacha in Bolshevo which was Seryozha's reward for service to the State. Once unimaginable. Now acknowledged freely. A pleasant Moscow suburb. Her daughter Alya was there, happy with her new man, Mulya. There was a married couple, recruited by Efron in France. But she was alone, surrounded by believers in the new Soviet order. All of them reporting
back to the NKVD. Everyone a willing spy, even Alya and Seryozha.

Until they took Alya and one of her friends for
interrogation
. Then Seryozha was taken, on Alya's testimony. Her mind draws back from that memory, but the pain of it colours her thoughts. Further back. Farther back.

She remembers the Civil War famine long ago, bartering for pig fat and millet in the countryside. She wasn't brought up to trade. She bought a wooden doll she didn't want and only succeeded in giving away three boxes of matches. The Red Army was everywhere. They ripped open featherbeds for jewellery. Back in Moscow, she and Alya dragged a sledge over the snow to return used bottles for a few kopecks. They left Irina tied to a chair for her own safety. She was too young to understand, and little children get used to anything. Tsvetaeva has tried for a quarter of a century to forget her pretty voice singing, ‘Maeena, my Maeena'. And that when put in an orphanage, Irina died of starvation.

All her sexual passions failed miserably and, if she thinks of them, it is fleetingly. There was the poet Sofia Parnok, with her Jewish face as handsome as Beethoven. Marina once showered her with bracelets and gold chains, but that was long ago. She had never known such physical pleasure as she found under Parnok's fingers. But in Paris she heard of her death without much emotion. And when she was told, on this return to Moscow, that Parnok forgave and blessed her as she lay dying, she felt nothing. And what of dapper Konstantin Rodzevich who abandoned her for an ordinary woman and drew her greatest poetry from her in Prague? Under his hands her body arched with pleasure, but to be loved in return was something of which she had not mastered the art.

Another memory flickers into life. Seryozha in a tilted trilby hat, his underlip heavy as Ehrenburg's or
Mandelstam
's
– two other Jews, after all – but not so slack. Green eyes under bushy eyebrows. The lines cut deep in his cheeks, like a Hollywood cowboy. A handsome man, working as a film extra.

The light has not yet gone, but the raids on the outskirts have already begun. The only windows are covered with strips of Sellotape to keep glass from flying when they shatter. She sees the pathetic barrage balloons in the sky. The Germans will take Moscow, as they took Prague and Paris, she says. They are her first words aloud, matter of fact, without resonance. No one answers her.

She does not say:
My husband is in prison. My daughter is in a labour camp. I don't know what's happening to them.

Or:
I have spent the last two years looking for a hook.

Even as I experience her desolate thoughts, I am aware of my own separate body. Unseen. Solid. Still breathing. Dressed in the clothes of a more comfortable era. I am suddenly ashamed of my old claim to resemble her. Her situation has always been so much more extreme than mine. All we had in common were desperation, a wild eccentricity, the long marriage, a sick husband, both of us working like a horse between the shafts to keep the family going. People found the stench of her flat repellent, especially the layers of grease in the kitchen. I had less excuse for my own disorder. Now she was a lost creature. Did I dare approach? She had been my Virgil, into the Russian twentieth century.

‘Marina Ivanovna?' I begin, sitting next to her on the hard floor. It is late afternoon, but Moscow in August is hot, and there is little oxygen in the crowded room.

She peers at me, as if puzzled. There is no reason she should know me.

‘Are you taking the boat to the River Kama?' she asks,
as if we were both ageing peasant women, between whom a moment of friendship was possible.

But she is staring at me as she fingers her amber necklace, as if I were some gypsy woman met on the muddy roads near Prague, as if I knew more than she did and could foretell her future. I remember how deeply superstitious she had always been, how any hint of foreknowledge would be bound to disturb her.

Now she asks my name, and nods when I give it to her, as if it confirms her opinion.

‘Jewish, I suppose.'

‘Yes,' I reply, stung by the ease with which she has identified me, and remembering her description of
down-at
-heel Jewish women like herrings, who shared her clerical job in the Moscow famine.

For the first time she looks friendly, even amused.

A plump sixteen-year-old boy comes towards her then to complain of thirst. I can see there is some animosity between them but she reaches into the sack she is carrying and brings out a bottle of water. He takes it ungraciously, and when he has drunk his fill gives it back to her, puts his hands deep into his pockets and leaves without another word. If he sees me, he makes no sign. It is her son Georgy, I realise, studying his handsome, selfish face. She watches him leave with an expression of pained tenderness.

‘Georgy did not want to leave Moscow,' she says.

But she speaks less to me than to herself.

‘He has fallen in love. He goes fire-watching with the girl on the top of our flats. He calls me an old crow. It doesn't matter. I want him to live. He is just sixteen. A brilliant boy. He deserves to live.'

‘Where are you travelling?' I ask her, as if I knew nothing of her story.

‘Towards Yelabuga. On the Kama.'

‘Don't go,' I cry involuntarily, knowing she would take her own life there, that her body would hang from a nail in a peasant's hut.

At this, she draws back from me and once again there is an expression of distrust.

‘An agent of the NKVD, then?' she murmurs, but after a few moments she shrugs as if nothing that could happen to her had much significance.

‘No other way now. My life is over. Has been over for years. Listen. Marriage and love destroy. An early marriage like mine was a catastrophe. I suppose you know: my husband is in gaol. My daughter is in the Gulag. I have written nothing for two years. What else can you need to find out, whoever you are?'

‘There are people you love.'

‘
Do
you still love people?' she asks. ‘I long ago stopped loving anything but animals and trees.'

Again, she looks intensely at me, her green myopic eyes puzzled. I long to explain my presence in her terrible life. To explain how her poems have given me courage from the moment I began to write. But I cannot find the words. And the river station is melting. Already people have begun to shimmer like figures in a mirage and I am losing their outlines. Yet I can hear her voice as if from beyond her own death. And her voice remains with me.

‘If you come to Moscow in a different age, I will look after you.'

There is a sudden bustle, the doors open and an irritable crowd pushes its way toward the boat at the dockside.