It appeared that Marina had occupied the intervening period in a frenzy of literary activity. What was now deposited on my desk were no mere poems, but entire poem cycles. Plus there was an epic poem (about the siege of Leningrad) and a ballad (about what, I wasn’t sure). The contents of this envelope were in no way an improvement over the first, but the cover letter was more peculiar and more original than anything contained in her rhymes. Marina thanked me. She wrote that in the weeks before she received my letter she had become desperate about her future as a writer. My gratifying remarks had given her new inspiration: every night, when she began to write, she taped the letter to the inside of the door to her communal apartment’s pantry. She took it down when she was done. She wrote every night, in her nightclothes, at a folding table in the space made when the door was swung open.
I hadn’t saved a carbon of my amazing, inspiring letter to Marina. I wondered if I had confused the bland letter I recalled sending with one to another correspondent, but as I examined this possibility I became convinced that I had not. The evidence was her letter itself, specifically her gush. I suspected that my enthusiasm was a crafty fiction, which she had invented to implicate me in her career. Perhaps she thought I wouldn’t remember what I had written. And there was a small flirtation here as welclass="underline" the invitation to imagine her writing at her table.
“Hey, old man, got a minute?”
Anton Basmanian had poked his head through my door, affecting a familiarity we didn’t share. An old schoolmate, he was now the editor of a small literary magazine that made a feeble attempt at liberal fashion.
“For you, two minutes.” I lay my watch on the table.
“Nice piece of work in Literaturnaya Gazeta,” he said, referring to an article of mine the week before. He beamed. “Very nice.”
I didn’t reply at once. Basmanian had violated an unspoken rule of the professional writer: don’t compliment another’s work, at least not casually. It was all right, of course, to praise work in a written article, or in a symposium, or even in a serious critical conversation with the author. But we took our labors too seriously to have them evaluated like a haircut or a new tie. We all knew that praise could be too easily given and too easily overvalued; it became then just another soft currency.
“Thank you, Anton. How have you been?”
“No, I thank you. Very subtle piece of criticism, but it’ll be understood in the right places.”
It took me a few moments to figure out what he was talking about. The article had been a general appraisal of current Georgian cinema, based on a week’s gloriously bacchanalian stay in Tbilisi. Then I recalled that my review had in passing praised the film My Father’s Orchard, which was loosely based on some stories by Elgudzhi Piranishvili. Piranishvili had written a bruising attack on the critic Mustai Suleimenov in Novy Mir just a few months earlier. This had come, allowing for publication delays, immediately after Suleimenov had blistered Fazil Iskander, who was frequently published in Anton’s journal. Sides were being taken. I had somehow blundered into a literary intrigue that, given the number of Caucasians involved, would probably send my greatgrandchildren into hiding sometime in the next century. I looked for a way to ease out of the conversation.
“Here’s some poems,” I said, pushing the manuscript across the desk. “Tell me what you think of them.”
“Marina Burchatkina. Who is she?”
“Some lady in Kaluga. She writes prose too, stories.”
The quality of his smile changed, showing his nearly radioactive white teeth. The smile was both predatory and congratulatory. At the same time, the image of the poet in her nightclothes penetrated my imagination. The flirtation hit home.
“I’ve never met her,” I said at once. “She just sent this to me. If you don’t care for it, fine. You can dispose of it.”
Five
From that winter (or was it another?) I remember great gusts of wind spraying loose snow up Moscow’s icy streets, blowing off hats and freezing the trolley tracks and tram lines. Through the twilight weeks and months of sub-zero temperature, Lydia remained at the dacha, reading under a sixty-watt bulb by the stove, eating macaroni and the vegetables and fruit she had conserved, plus whatever I managed to bring in from the city. Because of the weather and various commitments, some of which were frankly unburdensome, I couldn’t make the journey to Peredelkino every weekend, but she didn’t seem to mind my absence or in any way suffer her solitude. She made the acquaintance of her neighbors, mostly the straw-whiskered parents of our literary lions, so she wasn’t entirely alone. She raised her head from her books from time to time, I surmised, and gazed through the frosted window pane at the babushkas as they trudged in felt boots through the snow, pulling their groceries and firewood on sleds. When I arrived at the dacha, Lydia and I would mostly talk about what we had been reading. She had no interest in gossip from the city, not even when it involved authors whose work she knew intimately. She hardly showed more interest in my occasional and grossly minimized confessions of marital misconduct, except to the extent that it distracted me from my work.
In the afternoons she led me on walks along the village’s icy, rutted streets, and then into the woods on skis, though we rarely got very far before she stopped to investigate some tree stump or burrow. She marveled at the signs of life submerged within the brittle, unmoving landscape: moss on the underside of a rock, a rodent’s tracks, a deer’s scat, a momentary rustling in the underbrush. The burrows were her favorite sites of investigation. She learned to recognize which animal sheltered within each hole and, more interestingly for her, how recently it had emerged to forage. There were two sides to the woods and it was the unseen one, in wary repose, that carried on life from one year to the next. A creek was interrupted by a sloppy, half meter’s fall, at the bottom of which was a pool cloudy with tiny iridescent fish. Lydia gazed into the super-cooled water while I stamped my skis for warmth and made grunting sounds in favor of moving on.
It occurred to me that Lydia might have taken a lover here in Peredelkino, an eventuality that I did not welcome but had in any event prepared myself for. Turnabout was fair play and all that, especially after Tbilisi. On my return trips to Moscow, I tallied the likely candidates among the village’s permanent residents, the ones into whose arms she might that very moment be flinging herself after a weekend’s forced separation, and concluded with a very short list. In winter the village was populated by few men of an appropriate age or suitable social background.
I resolved to keep an eye on these three or four hypothetical swains, but the more I dwelled upon them, the less likely the liaisons seemed. There were much younger girls available, and Lydia had never been a flirt, and these guys worked too hard anyway, which is why they lived year round in the village. But rather than take comfort in the deduced proof of her constancy, I became increasingly worried for her. My wife’s emotional life was contracting. How could she not be lonely? Was literature and nature sustenance enough?