The Russian Jerusalem (4 page)

Half an hour out of Moscow is the writers' village of Peredelkino.

It is a warm afternoon. And there he is. Hatless and shirtless in a garden, drinking with two guests. He has a broad face, huge eyes and his cheekbones have deep hollows beneath them.

There are banks of flowers. A lilac bush. Lavender. The poet looks calm and happy. He has been digging a dark patch of earth under the fruit trees, and the spade still stands in the soil. He is wearing old clothes, and the lowest button on the right side of his jacket hangs by a thread. He moves a deckchair into the shade for one of his guests.

This woman, I observe with astonishment, is my old friend Vera Traill. When I knew her in Cambridge, late in her life, she was still beautiful. Now she resembles a star of silent films. Accepting the chair, she leans towards the poet and begins to talk with animation about her work in Moscow on the translation of children's books. Pasternak has been translating Georgian poets, and nods agreeably as if talking to an equal. She seems comfortable in the conversation, as if unaware of Pasternak's greatness.

The man standing at her side is bald and bearded and bears a fleeting resemblance to Lenin, in spite of yellow, misplaced teeth and horn-rimmed spectacles. He is uneasy and at the same time, as he looks at Vera, plainly one who adores.

Tsvetaeva hisses at me: ‘
That man has the soul of a stuffed
capon. When he sees apple trees in blossom he is reminded of cauliflower in a white sauce.
'

The level of her hostility surprises me, and offers me a clue to the man's identity. This must be Dmitri Svyatopolk Mirsky, the famous literary critic, Vera's lover. Once a prince, now a fanatic Marxist, he is in Moscow to be part of the new Soviet experiment. Vera has joined him, though she refuses to marry him.

Some years earlier, Tsvetaeva spent three weeks with Mirsky in London. Their one night together had gone badly; their days too. He wanted to visit museums, while she preferred markets and the great historic bridges. In several poems she chides him as a
gourmand
. He teases her equally for her indifference to
haute cuisine
: ‘One may as well give you hay.'

As we watch, Pasternak's new wife, Zinaida Nikolaevna, brings out cold drinks. She does not have the languorous Jewish beauty of Pasternak's first wife Yevgenia, but some traces of an illicit honeymoon in Georgia with Pasternak still hang about her. And her brisk movements speak of household order and a peaceful life. Pasternak has had enough of Bohemia, and no wish for another artist in his family. Her background was Russian Orthodox. He liked that. But as she returns to the kitchen, I have the impression she is displeased with someone; perhaps Pasternak, perhaps Vera.

The garden is hot and sheltered, and the drinks are welcome. Mirsky, who has twice signalled his need to return to Moscow, postpones his departure. He perches awkwardly on a bench. The conversation turns to literature.

Mirsky speaks of James Joyce, and the uselessness of modernism. He praises Pasternak, however, as he has done recently and publicly and not without some danger to
himself. When he takes his formal leave, Pasternak courteously invites Vera to remain: it will be hot in Moscow; the air in the countryside is fresher. Vera agrees without fuss. It had clearly been her intention to do so all along.

Tsvetaeva watches Pasternak and Vera with a certain bitterness. She is a woman of genius watching a beauty with no more than ordinary intelligence flirting easily with a great man. She longs to intervene, to speak directly to one of the few human beings she regards as her spiritual equal. But she cannot be seen or heard. So we listen and watch together.

At first, Pasternak is talking about Shakespeare. It is hard to make out his words, but his voice has a kindly, apologetic music in contrast to Vera's piercing assurance. He throws out his arms as he struggles to explain his admiration. ‘You see, Shakespeare holds nothing in reserve, he spends himself completely…' Pasternak does not finish one sentence before some other thought presses to make itself felt. Then he loses the thread of what he is saying.

But Vera is on another tack in any case. She is asking about his childhood, his family in Odessa, his painter father. He describes what he remembers willingly, but in
fragments
. As he speaks, I imagine a candlelit room in Moscow, his mother at the piano, Tolstoy among the guests; the immense privilege of the intelligentsia in pre-Revolutionary Russia. The casual mix of Gentile and Jew. The common, humane assumptions.

It seems not to be the answer she wanted, however. He replies at a slant. It is not an inheritance he is proud of. He does not like to remember how many Jews were among the intelligentsia. He has never liked their irony; or their jokes, which always seemed to him a kind of whistling in
the dark. He likes to say his nanny secretly baptised him as a child. It may be true. In any case, he treasures her peasant stories, her Russian superstitions. He cannot understand why any Jew would want to hold on to his own rituals. Why could they not dissolve among the rest of the Russian people? Such foolishness, to wear the kind of dress that made it possible to pick them out on sight, to huddle together so they could all be found and destroyed. He is sickened by the thought of a river in sunshine during the Civil War, and the pogroms that murdered so many in the villages nearby. A stubborn choice of martyrdom.
Why should so many clever, kind people choose to go on being mocked and slaughtered throughout the centuries?

And his father? His mother? Odessa Jews both, though the household was altogether secular. His father had refused to convert, even when it might have been an advantage to do so. His mother was a child prodigy at the piano. Music filled her childhood. Even after her marriage, when she gave up her concert career, she had only to sit down on her red velvet chair and play to earn applause. Music was truly her religion.

He loves them deeply: Leonid, his handsome father whose genius as a painter of portraits had brought his son Tolstoy, and Rilke too, and given him a relish for everyday life, however much of his own he gave to art. Boris is proud of them both. They are figures of an eighteenth-century Enlightenment. They are now in Berlin, he reflects, where they have already been informed officially that they are non-Aryan.

He tells Vera where they are, and she is astonished.

‘How can they stay in Germany?'

‘Well, they may come and live with me. I have a new Moscow flat which is big enough for all of us. In
Lavrushinksy. But I think they will follow my sister, who has married an Englishman and lives in north Oxford.'

There were other possibilities which Pasternak does not mention. His father had taken a trip to Palestine in 1924, and been overcome by emotion as he looked about him at an alien landscape of black cypress trees and dazzling dusty roads. Some holy Jewish sepulchre had moved him. Pasternak knows his father attended Zionist meetings in Berlin, but puts the thought from his mind. ‘On balance it seems likeliest he will go to England,' he repeats.

She nods. ‘And Osip Mandelstam?'

He hesitates. ‘He is in Voronezh with Nadezhda.'

Now he is watching her. He must have heard the rumours that she is a spy, but one in ten are spies and she is charming, so he continues to flirt with her, in his slow bumbling way that leaves women to make all the advances, as if he were a tree with sweet fruit, willing to allow any woman to pick what she wants from him.

‘You have to know how to surrender to idleness. A line of poetry comes after hours of forcing yourself, and in that idleness suddenly… sometimes…' He stops. ‘What have I done yet? Nothing. And now I translate. I shall never write anything comparable to Mandelstam's
Stone
.'

His face clouds. He does not usually go out of his way to praise Mandelstam, who is well known to be in trouble. But the preceding night he had been troubled by a guilty dream of him – unkempt, ill, unhappy – in his Voronezh exile, and woken grimly into the usual agony: the shock of Stalin's voice on the telephone in 1934, the first moment of incredulity, Stalin's question: Is Mandelstam a great poet? Then the chilling memory of his own hesitation before Stalin reproached him for not speaking up for his friend.

He is embarrassed to remember his own pretentious
lunacy, his suggestion that Stalin might want to discuss Life and Death. He can still hear the blank purr as Stalin put the phone down. Felt his own desperation as he tried to ring the Kremlin back and failed, naturally.

Pasternak had told the story many times, with many variations. Those with their own jealousies reported the incident as a sign of envy or cowardice. But Nadezhda never held it against him.

Of course Mandelstam was a genius. Only, Pasternak honestly did not approve of his poem about the Kremlin mountaineer. Mandelstam had spoken it to him, once, as they walked in the street. It was such a foolish lampoon. To write of Stalin's pock-marked skin. To accuse him of murdering peasants? It was a suicide note.

Into his mind came an ancient, tribal thought:
a Jew should know better
.

There were rumours that Mandelstam had gone mad in prison, that he had jumped out of a window and broken his arm and was having hallucinations about his wife in mountainous Cherdyn. Then he was brought back from the Urals. Akhmatova made the long journey to visit him in Voronezh, in the region of the Black Earth, and reported him still capable of gaiety. They read Dante together.

Vera had been talking, and he smiled, to disguise the long way his thoughts had wandered away from her. Then he said:

‘Tell me. You are a friend of Marina Ivanovna and her husband. We met briefly in Paris, a year or so back. I worry …'

Vera's pencil-thin eyebrows rise as his sentence drifts away.

‘I could not sleep in Paris. I would not have dared to visit her, but she came to find me at the Congress. Even in rags, she was still…' His voice trails off. ‘We walked the streets together. But there are problems in the family.
Disagreements
. They are hideously poor. Her husband and daughter are planning a return to Russia. Both Communist, I believe. Marina was even considering the journey herself. I did not advise her as I should.' Then he mutters, ‘Well, I was
half-mad
. I dared not let my parents even see my state.'

There was a chill in Vera's response: ‘Tsvetaeva is a wonderful poet, of course. It was I who told Mirsky of her greatness.'

‘He might have seen that for himself.' Pasternak's voice has a hint of reproach. ‘She soared above all of us.'

He falls silent.

‘However, as to politics,' Vera continues, ‘she is like a child. She thought Kerensky was a Napoleon. Now she doesn't even read the papers.'

‘I don't like to do so either,' Pasternak mutters. ‘It kills the present moment to be always waiting for news of what is happening elsewhere.'

He does not speak of show trials. Of implausible confessions. Of what he knows that this young woman, not long arrived from France, seems not to know. For a moment, he considers telling her exactly what had driven him to seek refuge in a clinic a year earlier: his visit to the Ukraine. Images he cannot shake out of his head. The starving, frozen people; the families taken off in carts to Siberia without clothing or boots. The murderous famine.

He contents himself with describing his confusion, put on a train with Isaac Babel at the last moment to attend the
Congress in Paris. He wrote no speech. The audience applauded because they knew his name, and because he spoke of finding poetry in the ordinary world around them.

Vera yawned, and stretched as delicately as a cat. Lazily, and without particular emphasis, she asked, ‘You are not a member of the Party yourself? Even though you support the Revolution?'

‘I am a Communist. In the same sense as Peter the Great or Pushkin,' he assured her.

Then Zinaida appears with a shawl across her shoulders. She is walking to visit a friend and has left cold food for supper. For a moment, she sounds bad-tempered and a little bossy. Pasternak remains his usual genial self as he turns to Vera.

‘Perhaps you would like to eat with me?'

Vera smiles at the invitation. She takes it as a tribute to her sexual allure, which is what she needs most from a man.

‘I must leave, Boris. I have an appointment.'

‘With whom?'

‘Yezhov.'

His eyes close for a moment and when they open that willingness to be pillaged has left his face. He looks cautious. Yezhov is the lynchpin of Stalin's Great Terror. A dwarf. An evil man.

‘You have dangerous friends,' he murmurs.

He looks unhappy, perhaps running their conversation through his mind to see if he has said anything worthy of report. It might be that his praise of Mandelstam was a little rash. Then, as if remembering the affection she had aroused, he adds: ‘So be careful.'