Vera frowned then, as if she knew she was straying off course, away from the inviolable Leo Orlov she meant to invoke. But she pressed on. “Lev’s shadow has always kept me hidden, and let me do my real work behind the scenes. For a long time he was perfectly happy with that arrangement, because it meant he got the spotlight to himself. But now he’s changed his mind.” She looked at me, not quite accusing. “What he doesn’t understand is that if he interrupts one part of the narrative I’ve set into motion, he could ruin it all—one small change and everything comes into play. Even me. And I won’t have that.” It was funny. She claimed not to have any personal ambition, but her goals struck me as godlike, transcendent: to be invisible, yes, but in the way of an elemental force, wind or geology. The movement of the earth beneath your feet.
What happened to her when she left Moscow? I wondered. Rolling her eyes through her tutoring sessions, translating expat literature in her free time, and then—nothing? It was hard to imagine her fading into black until Lev arrived to give her direction. A sparkling girl, a talented dancer, who could turn her horse at four-foot jumps and land without a bump in the saddle. A clever girl, surrounded in her youth by so many books she never bothered to count them. Tolstoy, Gogol, Chekhov, Dumas. So many ideas moving round in her brain; did she really never pick up a pen? “Vera.” I reached out to grab her hand, but thought better of it, and just tapped her. The contact resonated up my bones, like the shattering of sound from a gong. She kept so many secrets. “Lev’s books. You didn’t write them, did you?” My face was hot with the shame—treason, really—of asking this question, but I had to know. Her eyes flashed.
“No.” She snatched her arm away. “No. Lev is a great writer. There can’t be any doubt.” Vera of the deepest privacy, Vera of the darkest truth. “Listen, I don’t want that. I don’t want his credit. I just want to make sure he can’t erase what I’ve spent my life doing. He doesn’t get both.” The house creaked around us, expanding and contracting with the stuttering cadence of a yawn. Vera looked at me from the corner of her eye. A confiding look, I guess you’d call it. “Of course, if I had, they’d say he wrote them anyway. So what would be the point of that?” I leaned in, hoping for more, but already she was settling into herself, cooling off. “Women,” she said, with a little laugh. “The quieter we are, the less we’re seen? The more we get done.”
Small details in the room felt rich with meaning I couldn’t read: the brass of the teakettle, the single cupboard left ajar. Of course, I was the one making them symbolic, but there was a strange power in that. “I want to make sure Lev’s memory is established now,” Vera said into the quiet, “so no one can change it too much when he’s gone.” Nor her memory, I suppose she thought. But in this she was wrong. You can change empty space. You can write on a blank page. It’s the easiest thing in the world.
We sat at the table, scraping our bowls long after our soup was gone.
“The fact is,” she said, “he needs to go. For his own good. Before he can hurt himself much more. The story of him going after the manuscript is actually perfect, so long as he doesn’t succeed in digging it out. Great golden goose lost in the bloody historical bowels. Buried treasure without a map. Lost art.” She looked thoughtful. “If he’s got it, you’ll have to burn it.”
“But the book,” I said. “I don’t know if I could. What makes you think I would?”
“You came here to save it. You can leave to save it too. You just need a new way of thinking about safety, don’t you? And besides.” She picked something up off the chair beside her. A stack of papers. Some of them letters, but also a manuscript tied with twine. “I didn’t actually burn my copy. I just hid it from him. He probably could’ve found it if he looked, but for an artist he doesn’t have a very inquisitive mind. If it comes out twenty, thirty years from now, no one will try to pretend it’s a new novel. They’ll see it as an archive. A youthful folly. Which it is.” She pushed the stack over to me. “I thought you might need convincing, so I brought you this. Go ahead and read it. Then make up your mind.”
“He needs,” I stammered, “to go?” Without him I had nothing. The book, the man, the whole world was slipping through my fingers. Every kiss he might have given me, erased. Every minute of our future abolished. The dreams we had shared becoming nothing more than that: dreams, drifting away upon waking. My body began crumbling in on itself as understanding overtook me, my face puckering lemon-like and my arms hugging round my chest so tight they ached. I thought that Vera looked too calm, but maybe she wasn’t. Once or twice she wiped at her eye, brushing away the tears that didn’t come.
“Little bee,” she said. “You know what I mean. I’ve got my passport with me, my father’s flat in Paris, when the time comes. I’m going to take you, of course, give you something brand new. But first you have to see this all through to the end.” All business now, she nudged the stack again in my direction. “We’ll meet back here once everything’s done, and in the meantime I’ll make sure I’m seen here in town. There’s a decent enough hotel for me to check in to, and no one will think to ask about you.”
“About me? But how will I do it?”
“You’ll think of something. Like I said, you’re smart.” She smiled. “That’s why I like you.”
“You said that before.” I could hear the whine of fear in my voice, but couldn’t stop it. “What in god’s name makes you think so?”
Vera pushed her chair away from the table and stood. She was so petite, and yet she seemed to be made of heavier material than me, the gravity in the room all pulling towards her.
“I don’t show very much of myself,” she said. “I know that. You can see more than most. Maybe you look harder.”
And with that she turned and left me alone with only Lev’s too-familiar handwriting for company, hovering around me like a ghost.
He said he couldn’t write to me, because the risk was just too much. I accepted this. His absence, his silence. As I had accepted every part of him into me, each molecule, piece and parcel. The way his ears declared themselves, and his hands defined my body. Here the thumb curves over the shoulder, here the finger flicks the nipple. Eloquent elements. Lev told me he loved me, and I had no reason to doubt it, especially considering how much I loved him. Even the first day we met, hot sweat on his brow, chasing a young girl through the trees. Crashing out of the foliage like a monster in a story.
Of course, because I loved his mind, I treasured every word he said. The ideas he came up with: our fated communion. “Everyone I ever loved was leading up to you.” When we were naked, he was most loquacious, explaining our future and our past. The cosmic us-ness. He once took a razor blade and cut his name onto my arm, high up and on the underside. Not a thing that could quite heal.
All night I sat up at the table with a fat lamp and a pot of coffee, reading. First, Lev’s letters: he hadn’t sent a word to me, but he’d written Vera. Constantly, it seemed. Hasty letters on whatever slips of paper could be scavenged in the hounded towns Lev crawled through on his way to the border. I’d seen his notes to her before, but these had a new urgency to them, a desire to contain within them their whole life together. Trap it under glass. Perhaps he intended to make time stand still, but of course that was impossible. You could feel him, in the letters, plummeting through, even as he tried to hold on to every straw and scrap. Only to her, he wrote. Only to her. The coffee hurt my stomach and I spent an hour in the bathroom, voiding everything I could from my body. Still ending up with much too much.