His hand remained, resting against the plank. She watched it as one might a wild animal; something not inherently dangerous or with malice, but nevertheless unpredictable. She could be drawn to it, she thought, and she was surprised by this. Perhaps it gave some license for her own wildness.
Would she risk the touch of his hand on her neck just to feel it there?
It would be the heat and lack of food that turned her thoughts so strangely. When she looked down again, his hand was in his pocket and she was given over to the sense of something being forgotten or mislaid. Or something imagined; yet wholly unobtainable, just the same.
She expected never to see him again after that afternoon.
PART II
NEVER TALK TO STRANGERS
CHAPTER 10
In the early years, the artists and intelligentsia were eager to remake the world in their leaders’ vision. It was the dawn of a new century; the climax of a millennium. They weren’t just Bolsheviks; they were Modernists, Futurists, Constructionists. The Ivan Ilychs of their past with their caged canaries and dusty rubber plants were to be plowed under in the building of a steel-girded utopia. The writer and poet Vladimir Mayakovsky believed the Revolution had quickened their future. His play, Mystery Bouffe, produced in 1918, dramatized the conquest of the clean and proper bourgeois by the grimy, stubble-faced proletariat. At its climax, the audience joined the cast onstage and with them destroyed the theatre curtain that had been painted with symbols of the old world. Spoke Diaghilev in 1905, “We are witnesses of the greatest moment of summing up in history, in the name of a new and unknown culture, which will be created by us, and which will also sweep us away. That is why, with fear or misgiving, I raise my glass to the ruined walls of the beautiful palaces, as well as to the new commandments of a new aesthetic.”
In early spring of 1930 Mayakovsky was found in his apartment with a gunshot wound to his head. His death was labeled a suicide. In the previous year, he’d published a dazzling satire on Soviet behavior and bureaucracy, and was immediately damned by the authorities. His detractors concluded he’d be neither relevant nor even circulated in twenty years’ time.
In his apartment that morning, the agent in attendance pressed the revolver’s barrel against the writer’s temple, then angled it slightly back, toward the opposite ear, to assure the kill. The writer’s eyes bulged forward; his pupils darted repeatedly as if he needed to see the thing. He no longer made sense. Most pleaded until the end. This one instead over and over repeated, until there was only a mutter of words:
What did it matter?
The agent disliked poets in particular. Pick something, he told him. He thumped the table; it was strewn with handwritten pages.
The writer looked down, then seemed to understand. His suicide note.
What did it matter? The words softened to a chant. His hand touched a page, then moved to another, as if trying to recall something forgotten. He picked up his pen and added a line. He held it for a moment longer as he read over the words.
Mayakovsky looked at the agent and mouthed the question one final time. Only the question had changed. There was the smell of gunpowder and burnt skin. Eyes turned skyward. He fell from the gun’s barrel as if indeed it’d been holding him up all along.
The poet’s final question had been genuine. It was the one they all asked.
When did he stop loving me?
Stalin kept the poet’s original note in the side drawer of his personal desk until his death in 1953.
Years later it was revealed that the apartment where Mayakovsky had been found had had a secret entrance within a closet. His lover Lily Brik had been an informant for Stalin’s political police. The poet’s death tolled throughout literary Russia with an unmistakable voice: there was no place in Soviet literature for the individualist. The land that had borne Pushkin and Gogol, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Chekhov and Pasternak, fell silent.
It was Bulgakov’s third banquet in as many months; these were Party affairs and though he was not a Party member it would be ill-conceived to decline the invitation. He had drunk too much at the last one and his suit jacket had disappeared from the back of his chair. He cursed himself for this; it’d been his second best, so when the invitation for the next banquet came on its heels and his other jacket was still with the laundry woman, he was left with his third, which, upon inspection, could hardly be called a jacket but perhaps the ghost of one, the fabric along its back seam so threadbare as to rip with the slightest pressure. He decided to wear his overcoat instead. The room would be dark, he determined, and once the liquor was flowing no one would notice or care.
This one was in honor of the novelist Poprikhen. Some newly-hatched award for his most recent effort. Bulgakov had written a letter to the editor of Crocodile in praise of it. He’d written many such letters, opining on the works of his various contemporaries and was surprised at the ease with which they made their way into print. He was also surprised by his colleagues’ reactions. At the Writers’ Union, he had become someone to know. Introductions and invitations flew about—“Gregor, Gregor! You must meet Mikhail Bulgakov—Come! Oh wait, you’ve missed him, but here he comes again from the bar, and this time you will have your chance.” “Bulgakov—my man, next summer when we open up the dacha you will join us—now don’t shake your head! Irini—my dear, didn’t he promise? See—you’ve promised; my wife has the memory of an elephant. We have the best chef in the district—you will be as fat as a bathtub when you return—I promise you!”
Despite his frequent attendance at the Writers’ Union, he never saw her there. From time to time he would scan the room, registering each figure anew as though it was possible his memory might misrepresent her. He wondered if she was avoiding him. He could have gone to her apartment and he reasoned that he’d been busy with the novel and the play, yet in truth, he was anxious of her response. He could imagine her under his arm; he looked about at the women near him who wished they occupied that spot, and he remembered her face from the vestibule of Mandelstam’s apartment. Her careful apportionment of hope and distrust. Would it now be entirely distrust? When it was determined that his play would be reinstated at the MAT, he sent her tickets to its opening. It was months away, but he liked to imagine her there in the seat he’d chosen, her face illuminated by the lights of the stage. He could wish she might come alone, but he doubted it, and had sent her a pair of them as a way of demonstrating this kind of understanding. He didn’t allow himself the hope of her coming to find him backstage afterward, pressing her hand upon his arm, revealing in her eyes the wonder at what genius he’d achieved. He imagined theirs was a different kind of communion. It existed on a higher dimension.
He would then berate himself for these dreams; how pathetic they were! This was no way to live. He looked around at the swell of conversation and laughter—this was not how others lived. Already someone had drawn their arm around him—he joined their conversation, laughing as they did, at the expense of something he knew not what.
He arrived at Poprikhen’s banquet late; the room at the Dynamo Club was already filled with people; tables were set in expectation of multiple courses; silver and glassware glittered under low chandeliers—yet, to Bulgakov’s dismay, not even a single hors d’oeuvre had been passed. It all seemed a sad trick of luring together a room of hungry writers. Poprikhen appeared at his elbow; quickly he led him to a seat marked with a name card; it was next to his—the guest of honor. Poprikhen touched his breast pocket. Bulgakov wondered if he was yet beefier than before and if this could be possible without him actually exploding.