“And this is funny?”
“She comes to me for help and ridicules me. It’s fine. Funny isn’t the point. The joke is the point. The weakness is the point. The fact that they are telling this joke on production lines, at football matches, in taxis, this is the point. Where we’ve come to. This is the point. I haven’t written a line of poetry in nearly twenty years. Not since the crackdown after the Prague Spring. I took my reputable job and taught the books they wanted me to teach, stayed away from saying anything controversial by telling little smutty stories about the writers’ lives.”
Absently, he packs some snow between his gloves, forming a concave disc.
“So many of my friends kept writing. Even in the camps they wrote. Even when they got to their lowest point.” He is very still, then continues. “They’re dead or hobbled now, and I’m still eating professorial lunches. You know how they got their writing out of the prisons?”
“I’ve heard a few different ways.”
“They swallowed it and shat it. Or rolled it on their tongue and exchanged it in a visitor’s kiss. Women secreted it inside themselves and let the guards pretend to attempt to pick it out. Can you imagine the humiliation? They did what they felt necessary.”
“How many times did we talk about this, even back then? Go and ask one of your friends—the ones who are still alive—if you should have kept writing. See what they’ll say.”
“They can absolve me precisely because they’ve been through it. I can’t absolve myself.”
A ski jumper misjudges his flight, coming down in a flurry of light snow.
“I can feel it too, a moment opening up. They see their flaws, they are aware of the need to modernize. Gorbachev looks at those leaders before him—Chernenko, a senile old cripple with emphysema; Andropov, a man who had to have dialysis twice a week, who was so sick that everyone suspected the general secretary was in fact dead—and he is pushing for change but doesn’t know how to modulate it. We are making jokes about the man’s indecision. He is no longer a figure of fear. People are hungry for more. I know you see this too. But there is only confusion now; no idea where to push, who to ask.”
Maria nods. “Sometimes I hear these words, ‘glasnost,’ ‘perestroika,’ and they sound to me like the final breaths of an empire.”
Pavel throws the disc of snow towards the trees, they watch it disassemble in the air.
“There are some people I want you to meet.”
“People?”
“Yes, people. People I respect. Not windbags or idealists. Serious people. People who are talking of serious things, about access to markets, a maximization of resources.”
“I’m not asking for a way in, Pavel. I just want to be ready.”
“Have you thought about the possibilities of us going back to where we were? They may close ranks again soon.”
“It can’t happen on its own, you know. In the fifties, I drank for three days straight when word trickled out about Khrushchev’s secret speech. The end of Stalinism, the end of fear. We were expecting an era of prosperity. We listened for a great chorus of contradictory opinions. But it didn’t come. So we went back to doing what we do so welclass="underline" watching, deluding ourselves with fragile hopes, with an occasional moment of grace or luck; holding on to these things as omens. Hoping ourselves into inaction. Perhaps in a year we’ll be shot for daring to tell a stupid chicken-farmer joke.”
“Perhaps.”
“You’ll think about what I said.”
“Perhaps.”
“I’ll let you know about our next gathering. If you decide to stay at home, I’ll understand.”
She nods. “I know.”
When they part she walks down through the pathways between the slalom run, skiers dipping and rising from the undulations of the trail, many of them hunkered down, elbows and head tucked in, trying to extract the maximum speed from such a short, shallow course.
She reaches the pathway by the river and looks up. Pavel is still there, his face cupped in one hand, his gaze resting on the river, on the skaters swooping in the still night. She stays and watches him until he moves off. A man who is used to his own company. A couple stand and kiss right beside him, too close for comfort, but he doesn’t react, following the thread of his thoughts to completion before moving away.
Her walk takes her past the Vorobyovy Gory station, set inside a great glass bridge that funnels the Metro trains from the south to the centre of the city, its struts and girders slicing the ice of the river below into a latticework of shadow.
It’s her favourite part of the city, this walkway. Tree-laden hills curve down into the river. There are no grand statements here, no monolithic towers, no gesticulating statues. The Central Lenin complex is spread out on the opposite side of the river, but the buildings maintain a degree of modesty, their design quietened by the sweep of nature around them.
Nearing Grigory’s apartment, she sees his window on the top floor of a staggered block, in line with the upper reaches of the Andreevsky bridge. The light is off. It’s ten o’clock, too early for him to be in bed. Such a thing would be contrary to his sense of order. He’s out. Maria knows she can’t let the moment go by without some sort of contact: if she passes without leaving a note, she may not have the courage to return.
She stands on the slope in front of the gatepost, looking at the uninhabited apartment, and this is an experience that is not unfamiliar to her: looking at her home and feeling like a stranger. The same anxieties descend. She dreads the possibility of meeting anyone. She smoothes her way into the shadows.
At the door she presses his bell to confirm he’s not there. No answer. She punches in the code on the lock and finds the combination is still the same; the door pops open instantly for her. It’s a short hallway, but wide and well lit. She hasn’t been here since the day she took the last of her belongings, closed the door of the apartment, stumbled down these steps. She can still see the way he stood in their small vestibule, between the large mirror on the wall and the small oval one on the coat stand. Both mirrors bounced his reflection between them, so that before closing the door for the last time, Maria found herself leaving not just him but an endless multitude of him. Standing there, his shoulders wrapped in heartbreak.
The memory overwhelms Maria and she leans against the rows of brass letterboxes and stares down at the chessboard tiles. She runs her hand along the nameplates under each slot and finally comes to his: Grigory Ivanovich Brovkin. She’d hoped that maybe both their names would still be there, but of course hers had been removed. wouldn’t she do the same in his position? Why keep a daily reminder of your loss, your great disappointment, your great failure?
It wasn’t his failure, though, it was hers. She hopes that time has allowed him to relinquish all self-recrimination, releasing him from the wreckage she brought upon him.
Maria takes a notebook and pen from her bag. She leans the pages on her thigh and begins to write. After the first few sentences she hears footsteps on the stairs and looks up to see the caretaker descend towards her.
She nods in greeting. “Good evening, Dmitri Sergeevich.”
He pauses, surprised.
“Maria.”
He doesn’t say her patronymic name. She presumes it would imply too much respect. He has passed her on these stairs before; on a few occasions, walking with a man who was not her husband, making her way to their darkened apartment. Each time, Dmitri Sergeevich had not attempted to hide his distaste at her betrayals. Maria remembers how, on passing him on those occasions, she had wanted to melt into liquid, to trickle down the steps, to flow down the hill and join with the river, where she would become indistinguishable and irrelevant, shapeless and free.