The Russian Jerusalem (9 page)

We stand at a little distance.

It is early October 1958. A freakish autumn. The trees have only just begun to lose their leaves. Red or translucent yellow, they float through the warm air; cover the grass, sit in the bushes.

At his kitchen window, Pasternak stares out at a single red bud on the winter rose tree. He is thinking about his meeting with Akhmatova, who, without saying an unkind word, makes clear her disapproval of his sending
Dr Zhivago
to be published in Italy. And not because she thinks it is dangerous but because she senses in him an eagerness for worldly acclaim, a passion she abandoned years ago and now despises. He does not defend himself.

For a last time, he murmurs how glad it would make him if she received his mistress, Olga Ivinskaya, now returned from the camps, but Akhmatova remains unwilling to do so. He does not press her to explain that reluctance. Nothing to do with his wife, he is certain. Some rumour, perhaps. There are so many. And he frowns as he remembers some of Olga's own stories. She told him he was always called ‘the old Jew' by her interrogators, that they insisted it was impossible for a young Russian beauty to love a Jew.

Someone enters the room and he knows without turning round that it is Zinaida. He can hear her bustling about, attending to this chore or that. She, too, is angry with him, because of his foolishness in sending the novel abroad. She
knows little of the literary world, but shakes her head when he tries to reassure her that he has chosen a Communist publisher. He does not argue with her.

Pasternak has been writing the same novel for nine years, sometimes with the hope of publication in Soviet magazines. Why should he not hope for publication now? Not so very long ago he signed a contract with a journal for the first part of
Zhivago
. The worst times are over. There is no more talk of rootless cosmopolitans.
Noviy
Mir has published the first part of Ehrenburg's
The Thaw
. Poems of Tsvetaeva – and Ehrenburg's essay praising them – have appeared in Moscow journals.

But that was before the revolts in Hungary and Poland. Now, liberalisation no longer looks such a good idea. That is why Pasternak shows his manuscript to D'Angelo of Feltrinelli. He knows it is risky, which is why he tells D'Angelo, laughing: ‘You are hereby invited to watch me face a firing squad.'

Olga is alarmed when he tells her D'Angelo took the manuscript away with him. Unlike Zinaida, she is, however, resourceful. She can negotiate with those in power, suggest compromises, wangle concessions. He is glad to have her act for him. ‘Negotiations are a game of
bluff
,' he tells her, and smiles, as if he were optimistic about the outcome. All spring and summer the manuscript has been with Goslitizdat, after all. His poems are being published, and have been treated as important. He has even begun to write new poems.

Sometime in August, however, Ehrenburg visits him. He has spoken up publicly for the novel, but he tells Pasternak in private what he does not like. He disapproves of Pasternak's enthusiasm for the Orthodox Church. He is offended by the way he writes about Jews. His candour
is scalding. He uses harsher words than Akhmatova has done.

Pasternak shows the novel to several younger writers, including Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who comes respectfully to the dacha to return it.

Yevtushenko is twenty-seven, dressed in slim jeans; his eyes are ice-blue. He puts the parcel he is carrying on the table, and stares into Pasternak's calm face. He has dealt with members of the KGB, met Khrushchev and has read his poems to stadiums of admirers. Nothing frightens him. But now he is agitated. He has brought a bottle of the best Georgian wine. Pasternak receives it with approval, pulls the cork, and brings glasses.

‘You know I love your poems,' Yevtushenko begins. ‘I have them by heart. And I am honoured that you trust me with your manuscript … but –'

Pasternak smiles.

‘You do not like the novel,' he observes equably.

‘There are passages of great beauty. Of course. But what you say about the Civil War… you question the very foundation of the Soviet State.'

Pasternak voices no denial. His face remains impassive. He pours them both another glass of Georgian wine, retrieves the copy of
Zhivago
, and they talk of other matters.

When a few poems from the novel come out in an émigré Munich magazine, and the Italians advertise the forthcoming novel, Pasternak is asked to send a telegram halting publication. Zinaida cannot imagine what insanity makes him hesitate. Yet hesitate he does. Only when he hears from D'Angelo that no telegram will influence him
does Pasternak send the instructions the authorities require. It is too late, as he knows it would be. Fury breaks around him in waves. He is told the novel will
never
be published in the Soviet Union.

But the Writers' Union has made a huge miscalculation there. The news of a ban – which soon leaks out – guarantees the interest of the world press, and huge sales. Suddenly, there are French, Dutch, English and German translations. Akhmatova shrugs and smiles when they meet. ‘You will find Fame and Scandal are much the same,' she tells him sadly. She is remembering Zhdanov's decree in 1949, which took away her livelihood and deprived her of any chance of publication.

And then Ehrenburg brings other rumours. He has heard them from Louis Aragon, and he repeats them to Pasternak with anxiety rather than congratulations. It seems there is a good chance he will be offered the Nobel Prize, perhaps with another Russian writer. Perhaps alone. Pasternak had been nominated for the Nobel before, but now, even as he stands looking into the garden, he knows that the Prize will be no source of pride in Russia. The Writers' Union will take the decision of the Nobel Committee as a political insult. Too much has been written about Pasternak's heroism in the West.

Ehrenburg agrees it could be a disaster. Before he leaves, he has one suggestion to offer. Pasternak might approach the Writers' Union and propose they publish some safe part of
Zhivago
in Russia. That would defuse the excitement in the West. Pasternak considers the possibility. The two men sit together, drinking, as the light goes and the wind gets up. By evening, it has begun to rain heavily. There is a pile of leaves gathered together from the path to the house, their
decay hastened by the rain. Pasternak watches Ehrenburg's frail figure disappearing into the watery night. The telegram arrives the next morning.

The citation is for his lyric poetry only, and for a moment Pasternak's face shows naked joy. Without thought, without shame, he sends back his acceptance: ‘Immensely thankful, touched, proud, astonished, abashed.'

He knows what must follow.

Four days later, Pasternak is expelled from the Writers' Union. This takes away his right to the dacha in Peredelkino and any chance of literary earnings. Olga will cope, but Zinaida will be penniless. What else did he imagine? He has destroyed Zinaida's life, and his son's too, he reflects. Already, he repents of his hasty response.

He cannot sleep. The telephone is silent. The days pass in a single blank. Then, on 29 October, maddened by insomnia and Zinaida's tears, hardly able to breathe, Pasternak sends another telegram to refuse the prize. His gesture heals nothing. It is well known that only three laureates have ever declined an award, all of them in Hitler's Germany at the instructions of Hitler's government. Those at the centre of the Writers' Union are even more incensed and they propose a graver sentence: Pasternak will be deported, and deprived of Soviet citizenship.

Exile. His greatest dread.

Like Akhmatova, who had often been urged to leave Russia when it was still possible, Pasternak has always refused to live abroad. And for the same reason: a poet cannot leave his language. Life might be more comfortable with his
family in Oxford, but he knows it would be more trivial. Now there is no choice.

The warmth has gone out of October altogether. Even with a huge log fire, Pasternak is shivering. He speaks to both Zinaida and Olga. Neither wants to leave Russia with him; there are children who cannot be abandoned. He begins to think death would be preferable to exile alone.

Suddenly, he cannot imagine why the Nobel Prize had ever seemed important to him. He is embarrassed by his telegram of acceptance. It was not a betrayal of Russia but of himself. He is ashamed of the words he had chosen, and his reckless speed in sending them.

We watch him walk around the rooms of his house in a fever. He cannot bring himself to telephone anyone. He cannot settle in a chair.

But he has not been forgotten by his friends. A draft is being composed, in part by Olga – who has received hints from Soviet authorities about what would play best – and in part by Ariadne Efron, Tsvetaeva's daughter, now returned from the Gulag. They cobble together a letter to be sent to Khrushchev.

Pasternak glances at it briefly and signs without fuss. He does not see it as capitulation. It is simply not important. No more than the Nobel Prize is important. All that matters is to stay in Russia and to write poems.

As November comes, with snow piled high against the tree trunks, he is not unhappy. The sun glitters on the ice. He pads over the snow to call on a friend, breathing sleety air into his bronchitic lungs without complaint. He has lived a charmed life, he reflects. Why has God been so kind to
him? He cannot understand it, as he remembers so many less fortunate. Mandelstam. Tsvetaeva. And a list of others. ‘I am not worthy,' he often mutters. He rarely sees Akhmatova these days.

His hero Doctor Zhivago travels at the end of his book towards the Botkin Hospital where Pasternak spent three months after a heart attack a few years earlier. Zhivago never reaches it.

Pasternak thinks no more of suicide. Death will come soon enough.

It is a White Night in the far north, an evening with the sun yellow on the horizon, and a strange euphoric light which bleaches the firs and marshes.

An old train, with its windows barred and boarded up, its compartments packed, is transporting prisoners from the Kresty Prison in Leningrad to the far north. It stops at Konusha, a station in the southern sector of the Arkangelsk region, and a group of exiles – including a red-haired young man with a high forehead and powerful shoulders – are taken out unceremoniously.

The young man is Joseph Brodsky.

The village has no more than fourteen huts, all of them in pale wood. People who live there work on a State farm, their tractors scraping off topsoil which rests on granite. The land is being ruined by the new methods of farming.

Brodsky is taken to a hut at the very edge of this cluster of houses.

He has been sentenced to five years hard labour but he is used to manual work. He left school at fifteen and worked in a factory and a morgue before hauling instruments for geological expeditions in the far north. Half taiga. Half tundra. These jobs were his university. He is prepared for vodka made out of wood alcohol; an empty store which sells only loaves of bread and cans of foul-tasting fish. He makes friends with his neighbours, though at first they are suspicious of him.

And what does he remember now of Leningrad? The ceilings in the great houses collapsed. Their windows shattered. Inside, furniture and books burned for warmth. Between the shrapnel-pitted walls and the grey-green façades, the streets are empty.

To him, Leningrad is the most beautiful city in the world. His family lived in a room and a half between Nevsky Prospekt and Liteiny Prospekt, not far from the palaces, colonnades and pilasters of the centre. The iron bridges over the canals, the huge stretches of water going out to sea, suggest an infinite world elsewhere. All of it belongs to him.

Money has been short since his father was sacked from the navy when Zhdanov decreed no Jew could hold the rank of Major. Joseph has to answer that crucial fifth question in all his registration papers as ‘Jewish', but he takes no account of it. He is not so much a rebel, as wilfully irresponsible. He walks out of school, teaches himself what he wants to know – even plans to hijack a plane across the border into Afghanistan. But his most important act is to write poetry. By twenty-one he has been published in
samizdat
all over Russia. Akhmatova praises him, even dedicates a poem to him. The KGB have already taken him into prison twice. His friends suggest he would be safer in Moscow. He tries it for a time, but returns when he hears his girlfriend has taken up with another man.

One very cold night in Leningrad, he is walking along a street when three men surround him and ask for his name. When he refuses to go along with them, they bring up a car, twist his arms behind his back and take him to the Kresty prison.

Here in the north, he does not often think about his trial, held on 18 February 1964 in the District Courts on Vosstanie Street. Or the huge crowd of young people moving along a dark and dirty corridor trying to enter the room where his trial is to be held.

The judge, a stout, morose woman of about forty, mutters with some surprise: ‘I did not expect such a crowd.'

Somebody responds: ‘It is not so common these days to try a poet.'

She shrugs. Inside there are very few friends of Brodsky's. Permission to be a spectator is stringently restricted. The only literary notables present are those like Admoni and Etkind who are brave enough to be speaking for the defence. And Frida Vigdarova, who takes notes.

In the dock, Brodsky manages an enfeebled wave to his parents. He is twenty-four.

The judge frowns. To be a social parasite is a serious charge.

‘What is your profession?' she asks him.

‘Writing poetry. Translation,' he replies.

‘Why didn't you find work?'

‘I did work. I wrote poetry.'

‘What institution are you connected with?'

‘None. I made contracts with publishers.'

‘What are these contracts, and how much are they for?'

‘I can't remember exactly. My lawyers have the documents.'

The judge is clearly exasperated.

‘What is your specialist qualification?'

‘Poet. Poet translator.'

‘But who declared you to be a poet? Who put you on the list of poets?'

‘No one. Who put me on the list of human beings?'

A little buzz goes round the court, which is quickly stilled.

‘And did you study for this?'

‘For what?'

‘For being a poet. Did you take a course in higher education?'

‘I don't think it comes from education.'

‘Where does it come from, then? Poetry?'

‘I think it comes from – God.'

It is an answer that will go round Russia, and inevitably reach the West. He is already famous before the judge delivers her sentence. He is remanded to an asylum for psychiatric investigation, to be brought back for a further trial.

‘Have you any questions?'

‘I have a request. I should like to have a pen and paper in my cell.'

But he does not want to be famous as a victim.

In hospital with flu, he dreams of Ossia, his fluffy, ash-grey cat with eyes green as gooseberries. He adores cats: imperturbable, elegant creatures who don't make a single movement without grace. And he remembers the bridges over the Neva, the Moika canal and an icy courtyard filled with snow in the industrial outskirts of Leningrad.

When his friends Yevgeny Rein and Anatoly Naiman – also poet protégés of Akhmatova – come to visit him in Arkangelskoye, they find he has made himself at home in his hut. His good spirits astonish them. He tells them he is not much bothered by his sentence, that he is writing well (as he is) and has a radio he can tune to the BBC. He makes light of the work, the cold, the suppers of cabbage mash, the absence of women. At fifteen, he was working as a milling machine operator. He is used to hard work.

As he drinks, he answers their questions without allowing them to pity him: ‘You get up at six in the morning. Go out in the rain or snow or summer heat. There's no phone. No people to talk to. No women. But it's okay.'

When Rein asks about his time in the Kresty, he answers: ‘Prison is not so bad. Not enough space. Too much time.'

He does not want sympathy.

He describes the Kresty Prison: the Piranesi galleries, the walls of his cell which were brick but smeared with green oil paint, a barred window closed to the outside world. He does not minimise the horrors of the psychiatric clinic where the judge sent him first: the iron soldiers' cots, too close together, the violent men injected with sulphur. And the Wrap: inmates forced into icy baths, wrapped in wet sheets, put next to a radiator so that the sheets would dry out and, in doing so, tear off skin.

But his serenity is unforced. He tells them: ‘I thank God I am a stranger. And that I have no homeland.'

He shrugs away memories of his wife, who is tall, with soft features and brown hair down to her shoulders. She speaks little and smiles like the Mona Lisa. Some time after his friends visit she decides to join him in the far north, and
he is glad. But something is broken between them. Not just because she went off with his friend Dmitri Bobyshev that New Year's Eve when he was hiding in Moscow. She finds him too intense. He remembers his father saying of her, ‘She has dilute milk instead of blood in her veins.'

When his friends have gone, the solitude around him is as palpable as the Arctic cold. He tells himself: ‘I belong to the Russian language. I am still a Russian poet.'