“Of course you do.”
“Please. Look at me. I’m an old man. I have tufts of hair growing from my ears. It’s a definite old-man symptom.”
Maria cranes her head back.
“I see no ear hair.”
“I clip it. They can take a lot, but I’m keeping my vanity.”
“It’s a good thing to keep.”
“It’s the best thing.”
Pavel ended it after six months, sitting over morning tea, while she was making out her list of errands for the day. He said he was preventing her from making her own discoveries. She remembered the words distinctly, remembered her confusion that an errand list and a lover’s rejection—her first great rejection—should occupy the same space. A breakup like this should be done in a romantic place, with tears and rain. This is what she thought then, a girl of nineteen. She needed to make her own decisions, he said, discover her own opinions, not sit under the weight of his experience. She had no idea what that meant at the time. She spat curses at him, came to his apartment in the middle of the night, attempting to catch him with a new lover, which she never did. In the end it mattered little; she was obliged to abandon her studies anyway, move to Kursk. When she returned to the city with Grigory, she was a few years older; married, wiser, carrying her own bank of experiences. Had they met on the street she would perhaps have thanked Pavel, told him she realized the unselfishness behind his statements, the accuracy of them.
A pause.
“You wanted to talk to me.”
“Yes. I don’t know why.” She hesitates. “I do know why, it’s just difficult to articulate.”
“I’m in no hurry. Talk to me.”
Maria notices that Pavel’s eyes are still the same shade of milky green. She wonders if our eyes change colour as we age.
“I’m worried that something is happening, something I should be aware of.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I’ve been hearing things. Odd things, from various sources.”
“What sources?”
“Neighbours, people at work, remarks in the class. They…”
She hesitates again.
“Yes?”
“Have you heard about the ‘Shining Solidarity’ phenomenon in Poland?”
“No. I don’t think so.”
“When the Solidarity movement had to go underground, they developed techniques to keep up morale. They had help, of course. The Americans would send in aid shipments through Sweden, mostly communications equipment.”
“What kind of equipment?”
“Basic stuff. Books. Printing machines. Unregistered typewriters. Photocopiers. But the CIA gave them one impressive toy. A machine that transmitted a beam which overpowered the state-broadcast signals. Every few months on millions of TV sets the Solidarity logo would appear, with a recorded message announcing that the movement lived and the resistance would triumph.”
“It sounds like science fiction.”
“But it happened. It kept the movement going when people thought it had been extinguished. Viewers were asked to turn their lights on and off if they’d seen the logo. When this happened, a glittering light show would sweep through the suburbs. Such a show of strength. The whole city glinting like a piece of foil in the wind.”
The sound of skates cutting into ice.
She continues. “Things are coming my way. I don’t know. Worrying things. A neighbour of mine has seen cats strung up from lampposts. They mean something. I know it. There are kids in the Tishinski markets on Sundays buying up old military uniforms, cutting them up, making fashion statements. Other things too. I hear of clubs where women dance with replicas of red star medals over their nipples.”
“And you disapprove?”
“Of course I don’t disapprove—let them jerk off over the whole army. But I need to know I’m not wrong. Something is happening. I can feel it.”
“You’re worried?”
“No. I don’t know what I am. Restless, maybe.”
“You’re thinking maybe you want to get involved.”
“That’s not it. I have responsibilities. I have people who rely on me. I’m just barely clawing my way back from the wilderness.”
Pavel doesn’t speak for a while, simply blows on his gloved hands, rubs them together. The length of their friendship apparent in the silences.
“There are so many nights when I’m in a reception room in the faculty, sharing a drink with former students, and I don’t know who I am. I’m droning on, making witty remarks, droll observations, to people who are no better than reptiles, men whose job it is to do obscene things.”
He turns to her, and Maria notes that he’s more reticent than before, another way the years have taken hold. She couldn’t imagine hauling him through a blazing row any longer, a sombre weight to his words now.
THEIR RELATIONSHIP was largely built upon ideological arguments. She was constantly questioning, reviewing, surmising, churning all her newly gained knowledge through the prism of her personality. She’d argue with him anywhere. So many times their lovemaking was abandoned because of a throwaway comment from him. Or she would storm into his office, not bothering to check if there was a colleague inside, and bombard him with her fusillade of newly researched facts, slinging in an occasional well-chosen quote to underline her point. On one occasion, she exploded into a barber’s while he was in the chair getting a shave, picking up an argument in which he had silenced her, one day before, with his experience of debate and with the tapestry of facts that were always within his reach. A narrow, smoke-filled room with two barber’s chairs, one empty, and a row of waiting men, strands of hair clinging to the glass mirrors. She pushed open the door and cleared the barber away as he held his blade aloft, astonished, looking to his customers for support, but they were as shocked as he. Pavel’s rebuttals came so rapidly, with such force, that the front of her coat was dotted with flecks of shaving cream. Pavel remembers that he wiped his face clean, put on his jacket, paid, and left, with a stubble-mottled face, all without breaking the flow of the argument, countering her well-prepared perspectives, loving every moment of it. Loving the intellectual stretch she provided. Loving how it was intertwined with her naïvety, so that often she would be unable to recognize the limits of her argument, blowing everything out of proportion. And in these moments he would pause, would cease his replies, and Maria would realize her error and he would spend the next couple of hours trying to coax her back from her disappointment in herself. Trying to make her see that it was her commitment to her subject, her righteous fury, that made her so attractive.
“YOU’VE HEARD the joke about the chicken farmer?” he asks Maria.
“I don’t think I have.”
“A chicken farmer wakes one morning and goes into the yard to feed his brood. He finds ten of them dead. There is no reason for this. They were healthy, some of his best birds, so he is confused. He is worried the rest of the brood may be similarly affected, so he decides to ask comrade Gorbachev for help. ‘Give them aspirin,’ the premier says. The farmer does this, and ten more die that night. This time the premier suggests caster oil. The farmer does as suggested, and ten more are dead the next day. He goes back to Gorbachev and is told to give them penicillin. He does this and, the next morning, all the chickens have died. The farmer is distraught. ‘Comrade Gorbachev,’ the farmer says, ‘all my chickens are dead.’ ‘What a pity,’ Gorbachev replies. ‘I had so many more remedies to try.’”
Maria smiles at him. He’s always had a beguiling mouth, shape-shifting, simultaneously knowing and innocent.