The forest glistened – slashes of maple turning orange and umber, blistered birch trunks, sombre streaks of pine. She splashed lotion, herbs dunked in perfume, over her neck and arms, pulled on her hat, and strode in, penknife at the ready. She picked best in a semi-trance, mind emptied. The most sumptuous caught the corner of her eye, singular detail peeping over its parapet. She soon filled the basket, found a moss bed wide, flat and firm enough to accommodate the rug, and lay corner to corner. She took out Anna Karenina and plunged back into that fallen world. Antithesis of literature classes where she recited key passages from Gorky and other authors from the Soviet canon, selected to blunt inquiry. She savoured Yevgeniy Onegin – the soft, leather edition Tatiana left behind completed her father’s library – despite her teacher Yevgeniya Vladimirovna setting young minds on monorails. She insisted that everyone learn by heart whole stanzas in correct sequence, expatiate on their significance to Pushkin’s verse novel, its socio-political significance as harbinger to Russia’s inexorable path to communism, depicting aristocratic decadence in the person of Onegin.
Anna and the girls whispered at class end: pure-hearted Tatiana loves frivolous Onegin who doesn’t love her back. When he finally falls for her, she rejects him! If that’s not romance, what is?
In similar vein Yevginiya all but killed War and Peace, making the class chant: The old oak, quite transfigured, spread out a canopy of rich dark green and seemed to droop and sway in the evening sun…
Anna always returned to Anna Karenina. Disgrace bloomed in the cracks of a family striving to be unhappy in its own fashion. Sympathies torn, she skipped forward to the denouement, flinching as Anna dived under the train. Far from being trapped à la Madam Bovary, Anna’s French kindred spirit, side by side in her father’s modest collection, Anna Karenina gets everything she wanted…and squandered the lot. Having scaled the summit of her dreams, she succumbed to ennui. Overlooking the fact of adultery, her lover Vronsky passed each test of endurance apart from trying to shoot himself at his lowest ebb. Karenin having temporarily out-manouvred him, stood by their illegitimate child, shouldered their odium, even pledged marriage at the cost of his own standing. Anna could read a hundred times the scene where he led the steeplechase, only to fall at the last hurdle.
In Anna K’s shoes, could Anna Anatolyevna Kuplinova be certain she would do better? Well, not certain.
Would she swap places? Notwithstanding older Anna’s lethal infidelity – unpardonable even allowing for cold, unctuous Karenin – as always, young Anna’s answer was a resounding yes. She inserted herself as sub-sub-plot, claiming a corner seat at the Karenin table, a peasant waif older Anna had rescued from penury. As the youngest child by ten years and easily the best behaved of the Karenin brood, young Anna observed Karenin’s desperate attempt to jam a brake on his wife’s self-destruction.
The more she softened towards Anna Karenina around the edges, for this or that lapse of decorum, the harder the core of her judgment. Tolstoy wove in counter-narrative, of good family hard won. Flibbertigibbet Kitty spurned ardent, bashful Levin, fell for Vronsky who threw her over for Anna. Levin, whose first name, Konstantin, means steadfast – Tolstoy never wasted a word – braved a second rejection… and was worth two Vronskys over the marital journey.
As the train loomed, young Anna implored Anna K to come to her senses – just as she sometimes caught herself reproaching Tatiana for her abandonment, in the brief lucid interval before sleep. Drowsing in this copse, for instance…
Anna's arms, which did not burn easily, woke her. Judging from their deep red and the sun’s angle she had slept over four hours. It must be three o’clock or thereabouts. Insects swarmed on the basket, wobbled off. She scrambled to her feet, rolled up the rug, took both baskets and hurried away, wasps in angry pursuit all the way to the back door, still ajar.
Slipping through, she put down her baskets in the hallway. She expected her father would be pacing the floor by mid-afternoon. For someone with a sparrow’s appetite he was a stickler for mealtimes. The kitchen was as she had left it. He had not come downstairs in her absence. She ascended the spiralling staircase step by creaking step.
The door was half open. He faced the window – rather the top sill, his head tilted up. He looked to have dozed off in his chair until she saw three flies foraging in each nostril.
Even if I wasn’t obeying my father’s summons to the noon confrontation, I had planned my weekly browse through Anglia Foreign Language Bookshop on Kuznetsky Bridge Street, keeping a weather eye on market trends, snapping up an MBA companion or stray get-rich-quick tome. Whatever fleshes out the syllabus, I photocopy at work. I walk in that direction now, across Lubyanka Square, past Felix Dzerzhinsky’s monument. The KGB founder’s benign features stare straight ahead at his minions breaking bones in the hulking yellow-grey building that gave the square its name. Safe perhaps in the knowledge that it will take a crack team of mountaineers to topple him. Two acid attacks in the last six months healed within weeks.
Anna can recite – with a veteran guide’s bored precision – every architectural feature, building material and construction technique in and around the square. For her, Lubyanka’s significance lies in its banal surrounds – who sells the freshest carnations, where best to queue for monthly Metro tickets, ryebread at acceptable prices. Once I mistook this for insularity. Rather, she thinks in long lines for both of us, anchoring my wayward imagination in the minutiae of daily struggle.
Here at Lubyanka Square begins the crack in my heart, the fault line in our marriage. Trudging these cobblestones, the notion takes root that Iron Felix answers for our private woes, never mind the country. Worse, God stands behind him – literally, in a diminutive matching-yellow unchurchlike church outhouse where KGB launder their consciences. She kneels with KGB in spirit – for all I know in body too. A cuckolding in grand style, smuggling Him and the Virgin Mary and Dzerzhinsky the Antichrist into our bedroom. Via the icon in the kitchen cupboard where she worships. Having given up on the usual means, what is she hoping for – immaculate conception? Her betrayal in my face.
A cardboard sign hanging from the bookshop doorhandle says Anglia is closed for renovations, so I turn off Kuznetsky at Petrovka Street, towards Metro Okhotny Ryad. Grifters tout denims on street corners. Printouts on kiosk windows with tear-off telephone tags advertise furniture, antiques, book collections, dogs and cats to good homes, flats to rent or to buy. Desperadoes of both sexes promise Entertainment/Relaxation/Companionship. Forging Moscow State University qualifications is a growth industry. Prices like telephone numbers. They vindicate what I disparage as Anna’s kitchen-table view of politics. ‘Debate about building civil society is all well and good but it doesn’t fill anyone’s fridge,’ is her punchline.